How to get the most out of your DNA results

Last updated: 23 September 2024

URL: http://pwaldron.info/DNA/nextstep.html

Introduction

This page is always being revised to account for changes implemented by the DNA comparison websites; please let me know of any changes not reflected here.

Please use your DNA and your verified known ancestry to help your long-lost cousins to find you and to find your and their long-forgotten ancestors!

I have given a number of talks on this topic, one of which you can watch on YouTube.

I manage a large number of DNA samples on behalf of relatives and friends with whom I am collaborating on family history research, some of whom are not internet users or not as interested in their ancestry as I am. This generates an unmanageably large number of emails and other online and offline messages to me, many of them from beginners and containing incomplete or irrelevant information. This prompted me to put together the following advice to which I can refer my correspondents and which I hope will help them to get the most out of their DNA results.

DNA testing is not a substitute for genealogical research; rather the two approaches help to corroborate each other. Not so long ago, genealogical co-operation was based on the sharing of pedigree information with no genetic information; in a short number of years, many attempts at genealogical co-operation have become based on the sharing of genetic information via various websites with no pedigree information. Announcing that "I have completed a DNA test" without giving your audience the precise details that will allow them to quickly and easily compare both their DNA and their verified known ancestry to yours is not very helpful.

Both genealogical and genetic information are of far more use to potential relatives and to other researchers when they are presented together. Please consider the following advice before you start bombarding your DNA matches with incomplete or irrelevant information. And if your close DNA matches volunteer only incomplete or irrelevant information, do not hesitate to ask them relevant questions and to recommend that they also read this page.

From the point of view of any of your DNA matches, the most helpful way to share whatever you already know about the ancestors from whom you inherited your DNA is in the form of a pedigree chart, i.e. a chart with yourself at the left, your parents to your right, your grandparents to their right, your greatgrandparents to their right, and so on, giving each ancestor's name and dates and places of birth, marriage and death, as far back as you have been able to verify these details. There is a wide variety of genealogical software which will help you to organise the relevant information.You can follow these links to see examples from Ancestral Quest, AncestryDNA, ancestry.com, FamilyTreeDNA, MyHeritage and GEDmatch. These are just screengrabs of my own pedigree chart. In general, mousing-over or clicking-on the names in the live online versions of these charts displays additional date and place information.

These sample charts include examples from four websites that are widely used for re-uniting long-lost cousins whose DNA and/or pedigree charts have been compared and found to match: namely www.GEDmatch.com, www.FamilyTreeDNA.com, dna.MyHeritage.com and DNA.Ancestry.com. For best results, you must fish for your long-lost cousins in all four of these so-called gene pools. If you are already an AncestryDNA customer, then you don't have to spit or swab or pay again to get into all four pools.

You can pay FamilyTreeDNA.com and/or MyHeritage.com and/or AncestryDNA to extract the relevant data from a DNA sample. These companies turn your spit or swab into a simple computer file, hidden away on the relevant website, that can be used on other more powerful free DNA comparison websites.

You may even be lucky enough to find a generous relative who knows that your own DNA potentially contains the answer to a family history puzzle and is willing to pay for the analysis and/or to do all the work for you.

Whichever company you employ to create the data file, you and others can use www.GEDmatch.com, www.FamilyTreeDNA.com and dna.MyHeritage.com free of charge to analyse your data. In addition to the free tools, each of these websites provides further analysis tools for a small once-off charge or for a recurring subscription.

Once the data file is available online, then these great tools can (and should) be used to extract the maximum useful information from the raw data. If you don't have the time, patience, interest and/or technical skills necessary to do all the follow-up analysis, then you should at least be able to find a known relative or a DNA match or some other kind soul who will talk you through the process or even do everything for you. Don't be afraid to ask for help.

If you have gone to the trouble of submitting DNA to one company, then you owe it to your relatives to help them to figure out how they are related to customers of the other labs by copying your results to the other websites, especially to GEDmatch. A match who shares the same DNA segment with you and with one of your known relatives must be related to both of you through your known common ancestors. Conversely, a match who shares a DNA segment with your known relative but not with you must be related to the known relative through his or her other parent (the parent not related to you). While this information may not be of direct interest to you, it may be a vital clue to the other two parties to the comparison. GEDmatch is the only website which allows this type of comparison between any three kits.

www.GEDmatch.com and www.FamilyTreeDNA.com immediately give you an email address for your DNA matches. If you wish to keep your genealogy-related emails separate from other emails, then you can create a second free email account before you register at these websites.

If you need to contact one of your GEDmatch matches, then the kit manager of the other kit can use your email address to check your DNA matches and pedigree chart. When contacting matches, you must not use a different email address to the one with which you registered.

You may have to remind inexperienced GEDmatch users who send you emails asking questions to which the answers are contained in your pedigree chart of the various ways in which they can find the answers to their questions without troubling you:

they can enter your GEDmatch DNA kit number or your Email address in the "User Lookup - Find information on your matches" tool (the first item in the first section of the right-hand column on the home page);
they can enter their own kit number in the Kit box in the "One-To-Many Beta - give it a try" tool (the first item in the third section of the right-hand column on the home page) and select the Green search button, and then follow the links from the fifth column, headed GED/WikiTree; and/or
they can enter their own GEDmatch DNA Kit Number in the "GEDCOM + DNA matches" tool (the second last item in the last section of the right-hand column on the home page), and can use Ctrl-F in their web browser to search for your email address in the results.

If you need to contact one of your matches at any of the DNA websites, then, as a courtesy to the other kit manager, particularly if he or she is one of the many genetic genealogists who manage multiple kits, you must include in your message all relevant equivalent identifying information, including:

the DNA website on which you saw the match (GEDmatch, FTDNA, MyHeritage, AncestryDNA, etc.);
the name, alias and/or kit identifier attached to your own DNA sample;
the name, alias and/or kit identifier attached to the DNA sample with which you have compared yours;
the email address to which you would like to use in order to facilitate future communication;
etc.

MyHeritage appears to automatically generate the subject line of the internal message sent by the manager of kit A to the manager of kit B. Sometimes the automatically-generated subject line is the very helpful "MyHeritage DNA Match with B", but sometimes it is "MyHeritage DNA Match with A", which is very unhelpful if the manager of kit B manages multiple other kits. I have not been able to establish why the subject lines vary in this way. AncestryDNA leaves the user to make up a subject line, with no advice as to what information the subject line should contain. I have seen it advised that the subject line should include one's email address as non-subscribers may not read the body of the AncestryDNA message.

AncestryDNA gives you two or three buttons to use to contact your matches via an internal messaging system so that you can request their email addresses. The details changed as part of a redesign of the website, available in BETA mode from late February 2019 to June 2019 and scheduled to replace the previous version on 1 July 2019:

a green SEND MESSAGE button, replaced by a grey MESSAGE button;
if necessary, a green INVITE [USERNAME] TO ADD A FAMILY TREE button, replaced by a green Contact [Username] button (both on the AncestryDNA Match Details page, renamed the AncestryDNA Matches Compare page); and
a brown CONTACT [USERNAME] button, replaced by a green Message button (on the "Your Ancestry Profile" page, renamed the Account Profile page).

There has been some debate as to which of these buttons is most likely to catch your match's attention.

You must initially use the relevant internal system to exchange email addresses with matches at AncestryDNA and MyHeritage. Note that these sites may require you to have a current paid subscription in order for you to use their internal messaging systems, in particular to contact non-matches. This ongoing subscription is in addition to the upfront charge for processing your DNA sample. You may be able to avail of a short free trial subscription. If you don't wish to pay a subscription, save your free trial period if possible until after your DNA results arrive. You should exchange email addresses with as many of your close DNA matches as practical while you are a subscriber or in your free trial period. Then you can keep all your DNA-related correspondence together in your email archives where it will be easily searchable in future. There is no working facility to search AncestryDNA messages, even at the most basic level, such as to check if you have previously sent a message to a DNA match.

One of the greatest advantages of GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA is that they enable one to keep all of one's DNA-related correspondence in one searchable email archive, rather than scattering it around Ancestry, MyHeritage, Facebook, WhatsApp and other inferior messaging websites and apps. If you use one of these inferior messaging websites or apps to contact a match, then the match probably wont have all the relevant identifying information outlined above and will be unable to answer your questions. By all means, once you have established contact with your DNA matches via the conventional channels, you can look for and even befriend them on Facebook (where some people even reveal more of their family tree than they do on the DNA websites). However, it is strongly recommended that you keep all of your DNA-related correspondence together in your email archives.

Your initial approach to a GEDmatch match must be via the email address that you used to register at GEDmatch. Then, if you send an email in which you forget to identify the relevant kit among possibly very many DNA kits associated with the destination email address on several different websites, the recipient will at least be able to use the User Lookup tool at GEDmatch to identify you, to see your pedigree chart and to search for his or her own email address in the match lists for your kit.

In general, you can delegate the technical aspects of managing your DNA data to anyone whom you trust with the password for your DNA kit.

In the case of AncestryDNA (unless you appoint someone else as manager of you DNA kit) and MyHeritage, only someone with the passwords for both your DNA account and whatever email address is used for your account can get at your raw data file. Most people will be far more reluctant to give someone else access to their email than to their DNA data, but there are various ways around this:

a person to whom you have given the password for your DNA account can temporarily change the email address associated with your AncestryDNA account to his or her own email address;
in the case of AncestryDNA, you can appoint a Manager;
you can download the raw data file yourself and send it as an email attachment to the person helping you;
you can sit beside the person helping you to download it;
you can set up a new email address that you don't use for anything other than AncestryDNA; or
you can forward the relevant email to whoever is helping you (without clicking on any potentially single-use links in the email).

Like most websites, the DNA websites are much easier to use from a computer with a keyboard and large screen than from a smaller mobile touchscreen device. I have had several reports of people giving up in despair on touchscreen devices and reverting to a normal computer (Microsoft or Macintosh or Linux).

There are other websites which might also have been discussed on this page, in particular 23andMe.com.

However, 23andMe.com can not currently be recommended to genealogists for several reasons:

it essentially withdrew from the market by showing many, if not all, of its customers the message "We are continuing to modify some aspects of DNA Relatives in preparation for the transition to the new 23andMe experience" from October 2015 until at least May 2017;
it withdrew further from the market in August 2017 by switching to a GSA chip which at the time was not compatible with GEDmatch; and
it appears to have stopped hosting any type of family trees for its DNA customers, unless one counts a list of ancestral birthplaces, with no facility to add names or dates.

There seemed no point in providing further details of 23andMe on this page until 18 December 2018, when GEDmatch switched over to a new matching algorithm that can handle data from the GSA chip. I may add information on 23andMe at some future date. For those who wish to create a link between their DNA results at 23andMe.com and a family tree on an external website, see Kitty Cooper's blog post.

Likewise, MyHeritage.com's initial DNA matching algorithm had serious flaws and could not be recommended until late 2017, when these flaws appear to have been rectified and its market share began to grow rapidly.

I have become increasingly frustrated since I became involved in genetic genealogy back in 2013 by hearing frequently about people who are in just one of the online DNA databases and have no online pedigree charts. Without this critical information, it is impossible to place anyone precisely in my family tree or to identify which DNA segments they may have inherited from which ancestors. I have put together this page in an attempt to gather all the relevant instructions and advice in a single place and to make it easy for others to get maximum benefit from their DNA purchase.

Step 1: Submitting your DNA sample

If you have not yet been persuaded to submit a DNA sample to one of the DNA companies, then please read why I think you should do so.

The two companies with the largest customer bases are AncestryDNA and FamilyTreeDNA (where the entry-level product is called Family Finder).

The DNA company to which you pay your money and send your sample has a number of priorities, in this order:

separating you from your money;
assigning ethnicity labels to percentages of your DNA (measured in some unspecified units); and
sending you elsewhere for help in finding cousins and ancestors.

This page is designed to help you to find those cousins and ancestors.
There will always be some customers of the DNA companies who do not comprehend others' need and desire to go through the subsequent steps in the process, but the breakthroughs made by co-operation between those who do comprehend will more than compensate for the frustrations of trying to explain things to those who do not.
Once you have submitted your sample and received your results, there are some other steps which you yourself must take in order to maximise the chances that your long-lost cousins can find you, so that you and they can then combine your information about your long-forgotten ancestors and use that combined information to learn more about those ancestors in the archives and through the DNA databases.

Step 2: Sharing your DNA results

There is a trade-off between increasing your chances of finding long-lost cousins and ancestors (and being found by long-lost cousins) and maintaining the privacy of your DNA results. If you keep your DNA results or known family tree private, then nobody will be able to find you and you will not be able to find any DNA matches. If you want to be found, then you must let your potential cousins see your DNA results and your known family tree.

Some customers of the DNA companies appear to wish to maintain a certain degree of privacy and anonymity. Others find it paradoxical that those trying to identify their anonymous ancestors can be so concerned about anonymising their own identity.

Most people inherit DNA with their birth surname, so you should as a minimum identify yourself by your birth surname with an initial or a title, e.g., P Waldron or Mr Waldron or Miss Durkan.

Your first name, married surname, adopted surname or marital status reveal nothing about your DNA, so you may keep these private if you wish. If you use a pseudonym in place of a real surname, then you will greatly reduce the chances that your matches will bother to look at your family tree, contact you or share the information about your ancestry that they have and that you do not have.

If you are a married woman, or for any other reason use a surname other than one of those from which you could have inherited DNA, then you will probably wish that the DNA companies allowed you to associate your DNA kit with both your present surname and your birth surname, an allowed your matches to search their match lists separately by match's birth surname and by match's present surname. Strangely, not one of the DNA companies appears to have thought of this simple idea, although most of them are well aware that one of their main benefits is allowing customers to identify surname/DNA switches in their ancestry. If you have had more than one surname during your lifetime, then you will probably want to use your birth surname for various reasons, such as

to attract the attention of potentially closely related DNA matches with your birth surname in their family tree;
to avoid attracting the attention of probably very distantly related DNA matches who have the surname of your husband/stepfather/adoptive father/etc. in their family tree; and/or
to provide automated hints to your closer Family Finder matches at FamilyTreeDNA.com who both have you in their match lists and have your maiden surname in their pedigree (or surname list).

It is very important to reveal the gender of the person who provided the DNA sample, as valuable additional inferences can potentially be drawn once it is known whether two X chromosomes (female) or one X chromosome and one Y chromosome (male) are potentially available for comparison. While women are encouraged to recruit their male relatives to provide Y-DNA, they must NOT attach a female name or a female photograph or a female's pedigree to a male DNA sample, as this causes untold confusion and worse. In particular, wrong conclusions can be drawn from X-DNA comparisons if the wrong gender is assumed for one of those being compared. If a female name is associated with a male DNA sample, matches will have no idea whether it is the name of the subject's mother, daughter, sister, more distant relative, or non-relative.

Under absolutely no circumstances should you confuse your matches by giving a DNA kit the name of a real person (of either gender), alive or dead, other than the person whose DNA it represents.

Further confusion is often caused by using different names and different email addresses in different DNA databases. Please try to be as consistent as possible. In one case, it took me 300 days to recognise that kits using different pseudonyms at AncestryDNA and GEDmatch were from the same person. Delegating management of your DNA kit on a particular website to somebody else is better than not being there at all, but if you are prepared to accept emails from one website, then you should be prepared to accept emails from all.

If you want to change the alias that you have used for a GEDmatch kit, just select the pencil icon beside the kit on the www.GEDmatch.com main menu to "EDIT kit Profile or DELETE kit"; type the "New Alias" in the indicated box; and click the Change button.

You should allow those who are willing and able to help you to find your cousins and ancestors to see and to analyse both your DNA match lists and your pedigree chart, which you (or someone acting on your behalf) will have to record in a format known as a GEDCOM file. These may be people with knowledge of your own extended family or people with a more advanced knowledge of genetic genealogy in general. You can allow people to see your results in various ways at GEDmatch.com, AncestryDNA and/or FamilyTreeDNA.com.

Paranoia about privacy may be an inherited trait. This would imply that if you are paranoid about privacy, then your ancestors probably also were. So they have probably hidden as successfully from their descendants as you would like to hide from your DNA matches and others. In other words, those who are paranoid about privacy are wasting their time trying to thwart their ancestors' desire for privacy and trying to learn more about their family history. They are certainly wasting others' time if they submit their DNA to DNA comparison websites while trying to hide their birth surname, identity and/or pedigree chart. Those of us who want to use DNA comparison to advance our knowledge of our ancestors can carry on in the hope that our time will not be wasted by people who are hypocritical about privacy.

GEDmatch.com

If you want your relatives to find you using your DNA, then you have to put your DNA data where they will find it, which is at www.GEDmatch.com, the first place that all serious genetic genealogists will look.

The basic one-to-many report at www.GEDmatch.com will show you your 3000 closest matches (with more remote cousins dropping off the bottom of the match list as closer cousins appear), whereas the commercial DNA companies have fixed thresholds for determining your matches (so that your match lists there grow and grow over time). But www.GEDmatch.com has many other more useful reports than the basic one-to-many.

If you have sent a DNA sample to one of the commercial DNA companies, then you (or someone acting on your behalf) must copy the raw data generated by the commercial company to www.GEDmatch.com in order to obtain the full value of your purchase, both for yourself and for your relatives who are in the DNA databases. You (or someone acting on your behalf) must also upload a GEDCOM file to www.GEDmatch.com and link each of the DNA kits that you upload to the relevant individuals in the GEDCOM file.

You will be issued with a GEDmatch kit number when your DNA file has been uploaded; it might have been better if GEDmatch insisted on both the DNA file and the GEDCOM file being uploaded together before issuing kit numbers, although that would pose a problem for adoptees.

Once you have your own kit number, you can run a one-to-one comparison from the main menu with the kit number of anyone that you think might be related to you. For example, my own kit number is VA864386C1.

One huge advantage of www.GEDmatch.com is that it accepts uploads from all the commercial DNA companies and so also allows one to fish for possible relatives in the potential combined pool of interested, patient and technically competent customers of all the competing DNA companies. On the other hand, it seems that some customers of the commercial firms are lacking the interest, the patience and the technical competence or just the confidence to copy their data to www.GEDmatch.com. If you are one of these people, then you belong to the audience for whom I have written this page. I hope that it will inspire your interest, give you confidence in GEDmatch and in your own ability to use it, and provide you with simple instructions for the once-off procedures required to start using GEDmatch. If you like to follow hard-copy instructions, just print off this page before you start.

If you have doubts as to the massive benefits of copying your data to GEDmatch, then you may want to read Kitty Cooper's thoughts on the subject.

If you have not already created a GEDmatch.com account, then you will need to create one before you can upload your data (or before the person uploading on your behalf can transfer your DNA data and pedigree chart to your email address). To get started, type www.GEDmatch.com in your browser address bar, then find "Not Registered? Click HERE" (or just click this link) and follow instructions. GEDmatch users can upload data for more than one person under the same email address, and can transfer DNA kits and GEDCOM files to the email addresses of other registered users.

AncestryDNA Customers

In the case of AncestryDNA, you have the option of making someone else a Manager of your DNA kit (see below). The Manager will be able to download your raw data.

AncestryDNA provides instructions for Downloading Raw DNA Data. I will repeat the details here also.

Make sure that you are logged in to the relevant account
Go to http://dna.ancestry.com/.
If there is more than one DNA kit linked to your ancestry.com account, choose the relevant one from the VIEW ANOTHER TEST dropdown menu near the top right corner.
(If you are lucky enough to have more than about a dozen kits linked to your account and if your surname is well down the alphabet, like Waldron, then you will have two scroll bars to choose from in order to select your kit; which one to use will depend on which browser you are using!)
Select the SETTINGS button near the top right corner (beside the VIEW ANOTHER TEST dropdown, if it exists).
Scroll down to the Download or Delete section and select Download DNA data.
Tick the box to confirm that you understand what you are doing, and select Continue.
Wait for an email to arrive to the email address associated with your ancestry.com account. (If the wait seems unusually long, make sure that the device on which you read your emails is connected to WiFi.)
Click on the
Confirm Data Download
button in the email. (This link will expire after 7 days or the first use. To download your data after the expiration, you will need to initiate the process again on the website.)
Log in again if necessary.
Click the Download DNA Data button on the page which opens.
When prompted, save the .zip file somewhere on your device that you can find it. Do NOT open or unzip it (Macintosh users should disable auto unzip in the Safari web browser).
Ignore any advice like "use the webserver to find the correct programme or select a programme from a list of installed programmes".
There is nothing in either the suggested file name (dna-data-yyyy-mm-dd.zip, where dd, mm and yyyy represent the day, month and year of the download) or the file contents to identify whose DNA it represents. Since you may end up saving similar files for different individuals, I recommend that you change the suggested file name to a file name including the name of the DNA subject. This will not affect subsequent uploads to www.GEDmatch.com or FamilyTreeDNA.com or MyHeritage.com.
Make a note of, or just remember, the location where you have saved the file for the next step.

Having downloaded the file, you must now upload it to GEDmatch.com (and also to FamilyTreeDNA.com and to MyHeritage.com; see below).

Before you can upload your .zip file to GEDmatch you must have registered.
Once you have registered, you can authorise someone else to copy your results and transfer your GEDmatch kit to your own email address.
Assuming that you have registered at GEDmatch and intend to upload the file yourself, type www.GEDmatch.com in your browser address bar.
Enter your Email Address and Password, <Tab>, <Enter>.
Once you have logged in to your GEDmatch.com account, you'll find a link to
Generic Uploads (23andme, FTDNA,
AncestryDNA, most others)
in the right-hand column on the home page (which can also be referred to as the www.GEDmatch.com main menu)
Open this link in a new tab.
You'll need to upload the raw data which you have saved on your computer from whichever commercial DNA website you have used.
When you follow the link, you will see this form:
You may want to open the "DETAILED UPLOAD INSTRUCTIONS" link at the top right, which automatically opens in a new tab, but I have copied most of those instructions here.
At the top of the page use the Browse button to choose your saved zipped DNA file.
Fill out the remainder of this form.
Click the UPLOAD button. It's IMPORTANT that you wait for all chromosomes to load, it will tell you when it's finished (this is faster than it used to be, but may take 5-10 minutes). Your GEDmatch kit number will then be displayed. Give this kit number to anyone that you think may be related to you.
When the data has been uploaded, you will immediately (or at least within a minute or so) be able to run one-to-one comparisons and use some features of the site.
Additional batch processing, which usually takes anything from a few hours to a few days, must complete before you can run one-to-many comparisons and use some of the other tools comparing you to everyone in the data pool.

Now be patient while your data is being processed at GEDmatch.com.

The next step for AncestryDNA customers is to upload to FamilyTreeDNA.com.

The next step for FamilyTreeDNA.com customers is to add your kit to relevant new or existing projects.

FamilyTreeDNA Customers

If you are an FTDNA customer, then your Build 37 Concatenated Raw Data (GZIP, CSV) must first be downloaded either by yourself or by an FTDNA Group Project Administrator to whom you have given advanced access and authorisation to upload to GEDmatch. Whoever downloads the data must have the file handy on the relevant device before going near GEDmatch.com.

To Download DNA Data Files from FTDNA, log in to your FTDNA account in another browser window or tab. Then click here to go to the Family Tree DNA Download Your Data page.

You will see this:

You must download exactly one of these three files - the Build 37 Concatenated Raw Data (GZIP, CSV) file at the bottom right.
When prompted, save the .zip file somewhere on your device that you can find it. Do NOT open or unzip it (Macintosh users should disable auto unzip in the Safari web browser).
Ignore any advice like "use the webserver to find the correct programme or select a programme from a list of installed programmes".
On some devices and with some browsers, the .zip file may be automatically saved to a "Downloads" folder without any prompt. I cannot provide details for all devices and all browsers here, but if you are using Mozilla Firefox and have configured it to save all downloaded file in the same folder, then you can check the location of that folder by typing
about:preferences#general
in the address bar and looking in the Downloads section of that page. If you are still unable to find the file that you have downloaded, just search your device for files whose names begin with 37_
GEDmatch.com expects the data exactly as it is downloaded from FTDNA.
Accept the prompt to name the file 37_I_Surname_Chrom_Autoso_yyyymmdd.csv.gz (where "I" denotes your initial, "Surname" denotes your surname and "yyyymmdd" denotes the date on which the download took place).
Remember the location where you have saved the file for the next step, which is exactly the same as that for AncestryDNA customers described in detail above.

Note that the raw data files usually don't show up for about a day (and sometimes several days) after the match list. So you may see an error message when you try to download for a newly processed sample.

Sometimes the error message reads:

uh oh...

Houston, we have a problem!

There was an error while attempting to load the page
you requested.

Details:

URL /my/family-finder/downloads.aspx

Username xxxxxx

Error The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.

Status Code 500

More recently, the error message has read as follows (with no button to click!):

"The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found. Please click this button to report the error:"

If this happens, just wait 24 hours and then try again, or at least be as patient as you can.

MyHeritage Customers

First, make sure that you have access to the email account associated with the MyHeritage account and that you are logged in to the MyHeritage account.

On the Manage DNA kits page, click on the three dots at the right of the row for the relevant kit and select "Download kit" from the menu which appears.

Nested pop-up windows with further information appear. Click the Continue button.

Tick the box saying "I confirm that downloading the DNA data will create a copy that is not protected by MyHeritage DNA's security and privacy settings. I accept all responsibility and risk associated with storing the DNA data once I have downloaded it." The downloaded copy of your data is actually far more private and less risky that the copy on the MyHeritage server.

Then follow the instructions sent by email.

[I do not have any MyHeritage data linked to my email address, so cannot provide further details here.]

AncestryDNA

AncestryDNA has a firm policy of NOT providing its customers with the types of DNA analysis tools available at GEDmatch.com.
However, Ancestry has offered three very different options to share:

share a family tree;
share ethnicity estimates; and
share DNA match lists.

The last-mentioned is the most useful and was once the best hidden. Follow these steps to share your match list (which you can do even before your kit has completed processing):

Make sure that you are logged in to the relevant account
Go to http://dna.ancestry.com/
If there is more than one DNA kit linked to your ancestry.com account, choose the relevant one from the VIEW ANOTHER TEST dropdown menu near the top right corner.
Select the SETTINGS button beside this.
Find the "DNA test sharing" section in the main column
Select the "DNA test sharing" link two lines further down
Click the blue "Invite" button
Enter an email address or username (to avoid transcription errors, just copy and paste the email address)
Select Viewer or Collaborator or Manager from the dropdown menu
Click the next blue "Invite" button.

If you appoint a Manager, then he or she will be able to (help you to) download your raw data.

If you would like the invitee to help you to use the coloured dots and stars to group your matches, then the invitee would have to be a Collaborator, but otherwise being a Viewer is sufficient.

An invitation to view someone's AncestryDNA match list takes the form of an email with a

Review Invitation

button.

Clicking on this button in the email asks you to confirm your AncestryDNA login details before allowing you access to the match list.

You should click only once on the button; clicking again asks you again to confirm your Ancestry login details, but then diverts to
https://www.ancestry.com/dna/403
which says
"403 Error
You Are Not Authorized to Access This Page".
This is a bug in the Ancestry set-up.

The button above is not a real invitation and will also take you to https://www.ancestry.com/dna/403 if you click on it.

Once you have accepted an invitation to view someone else's match list, you will see a dropdown menu headed "VIEW ANOTHER TEST" on your AncestryDNA summary page and the full name of the person who invited you to view his or her match list will appear on that menu.

FamilyTreeDNA.com

If you have employed AncestryDNA to extract the data from your DNA, then you must copy the data to FamilyTreeDNA.com via the free Autosomal Transfer. This merely involves uploading the same file that you should have already uploaded to GEDmatch.com.

You may get an error message when you first click the "Join Today!" button. If so, then you should check your email, where you may find a notification with a kit number in the format Bxxxxxxx and a password. If so, then use that kit number and password to log in before going back to the Autosomal Transfer page.

You can pay a small fee (USD19 as of 18 May 2017) to unlock all the analysis tools.

A small number of AncestryDNA raw data files are in a non-standard format which is rejected by the FamilyTreeDNA uploader (although perfectly acceptable to GEDmatch). There is a free online tool which will convert the non-standard AncestryDNA files into the standard format.

(Technical aside: Ancestry and FTDNA now use different sets of SNPs. The overlap is only around half the size of the FTDNA set. It is naturally much harder to find long runs of half-identical locations in a much smaller set of SNPs. The consequence is that Ancestry transfers with the different set of SNPs on average seem to have only around 10% of the number of matches of native FTDNA kits, but these include all the closest matches. Ancestry originally used the same set of SNPs as FTDNA, so early AncestryDNA customers will have essentially the same matches to their autosomal transfer as if they submitted a DNA sample directly to FTDNA.)

The easiest way to share results at FamilyTreeDNA.com is by joining an existing project (such as the Clare Roots project which I administer for those with roots in County Clare, Ireland) or by setting up a new project. The procedure is the same whether you have sent a DNA sample to FamilyTreeDNA.com or merely transferred your data file from AncestryDNA.

Project administrators and co-administrators can view and advise on the results of all project members; they cannot change the primary email address or download the raw data file unless you give them Advanced access here.

If you have ancestors from County Clare, then you can join the Clare Roots project by logging in to your FamilyTreeDNA kit and going here, where you have to click a JOIN button to the right of the ruin in the banner photograph.

If you want to see how many of your Family Finder matches are in any project that you have joined, then just go to the Advanced Matches page and tick the Family Finder checkbox and select the project in the "Show Matches For" dropdown.

You should search for relevant surname projects. The easiest way to find projects is to use Google and search for, e.g., Waldron FTDNA project.
Some surname projects welcome anyone with the surname in their ancestry; others are confined to men with the surname who have bought Y-DNA products.

If you are working, on your own or with others, on several DNA samples, then you can apply to set up a private project to facilitate access, and can make your collaborators administrators or co-administrators of the project.
There is a simple five-step application process (which actually consists of only four steps!).
I recommend that you prepare your application offline and copy and paste into the online form when you are ready - this will save time if you later want to set up another project for a different family group or if for any reason you need to resubmit your application.

MyHeritage.com

Some people find the MyHeritage upload procedures thoroughly confusing and get lost. I hope that this advice will help readers to find their way through these procedures.

Uploading GEDCOM before DNA

MyHeritage.com very sensibly used to explicitly ask new users to upload a pedigree chart before uploading DNA data. Adoptees could upload a single-person pedigree chart. However, this clear advice appears to have been removed and users are left to puzzle their own way around the website. The principle remains the same: it is easiest to upload the GEDCOM first, and then the DNA data.

If the DNA subject is not yet in a family tree at MyHeritage but you have a GEDCOM file including the DNA subject and his or her direct ancestors, then you should begin by going to the Import GEDCOM - MyHeritage page. If you are not already logged in when you follow this link, then you will be diverted to a login page, but logging in will initially divert you to the wrong page, so you will have to come back to this page and follow the link in this paragraph a second time.

Once you get to the correct page, just follow the instructions to upload your GEDCOM file.

After uploading your GEDCOM file, you will see this message:

Your GEDCOM file was successfully uploaded and is currently being processed.
You will receive an email to ... once processing is complete.

You will then have to wait some time for the arrival of this email telling you that your GEDCOM file has been processed before you can start uploading DNA data.

There are two possible outcomes to the GEDCOM upload:

Your GEDCOM can be uploaded as an additional "family tree" in an existing "family site" (if there already is one or more family sites in your account); or
Your GEDCOM can be uploaded as the first "family tree" in a new "family site".

I have not worked out how to select which of the above outcomes will occur. If others have previously invited you to view their family tree(s) of family site(s) at MyHeritage.com, then you must also take care to ensure that your own pedigree chart and DNA data do not get associated with any of their names.

Now you have to navigate your way in the relevant family tree in the relevant family site to the individual whose DNA you want to upload.

Once you have received the email telling you that your GEDCOM file has been processed, you can just follow the link in the email to open the relevant family tree.

Alternatively, you can go to the Select site - MyHeritage page and choose the relevant "Go to this site" button. If there are multiple family trees in the relevant family site, then you can mouseover "Family tree" on the second menu from the top and select "Manage trees" from the dropdown menu which appears, in order to choose the relevant family tree, and finally navigate to the relevant individual in that family tree.

When you are sure that the person in the collapsible column at the left of the screen is the person whose DNA data you wish to upload, scroll down to the bottom of that collapsible column, where you will find two options, provided that the DNA subject is recorded as still living:

Order DNA test
Upload DNA data

There is an alternative approach, which you must use if the individual whose DNA you are uploading is recorded as deceased in the family tree:

In the menu which is the second line within most MyHeritage pages, mouseover DNA, then select "Upload DNA data" from the dropdown menu which appears.

After selecting "Upload DNA data", follow instructions, noting the following:

MyHeritage uses the "Build 37 Raw Data Concatenated" file, which is now the only one available from FamilyTreeDNA; if you previously saved the old Build 36 version, go back and download Build 37.
The details of the person who was tested will auto-complete when you start typing his or her name (provided that you enter the name as it appears in a family tree in the current family site).
It is particularly important that you answer "Yes" to allow the new person’s DNA Matches to view shared DNA segments and download shared DNA segment data.
It is not necessary to give consent to participate in the DNA Research Project.
Having ticked all of the mandatory boxes, you can select the "Upload" button and select the DNA file.

The individual's year of birth is used in the calculation of estimated relationships to your DNA matches. It is requested if the DNA data is uploaded before the GEDCOM file, and should be requested if it is not contained in the GEDCOM file, but is not!

You will see a message along the lines of:

"Your file is being uploaded.

Please remain on this page until upload is complete."

After a brief wait for your raw data file to upload, you will see a message like one of these:

FT-FFFFFF uploaded on Dec 15 2019

or

DNA uploaded successfully
DNA kit AN-FFFFFF was uploaded successfully and assigned to ...
We will begin processing this kit immediately and results will be available in 5-7 days. We will email you as soon as the results are ready.

or

DNA uploaded successfully
DNA kit FFFFFF was uploaded successfully and assigned to ...
The file you have uploaded is in a format that we do not currently support. We are working to add support for this file type soon and will notify you by email once your results are ready.

Time will tell what "soon" means in the last of these messages.

When your first DNA upload is complete, you will be advised that "You may upload raw DNA data of your relatives by visiting their profiles in your family tree".

After all your DNA uploads are complete, wait another few days for processing to complete and then look at your match list(s).

Uploading DNA before GEDCOM

The procedure for changing the link between a MyHeritage DNA data file uploaded previously and the associated pedigree chart is very well hidden. At one stage, I could not figure out how to do this without uploading the DNA file again.

If one wants to link an existing DNA file to an existing or revised GEDCOM file, then the starting point is the Manage DNA kits page:

click on the three dots at the right of the row for the relevant kit and select "Re-assign kit to a different person" from the menu which appears;
in the pop-up which appears, start to "Enter the details of the person who was tested", exactly as the person's name appears in your GEDCOM file;
when the name appears in the dropdown menu, select it;
if you have two people with exactly the same name in your GEDCOM file, then you will have to guess, as there appears to be no way to cross-check dates and places to distinguish between namesakes;
tick the (mandatory) box to confirm that you "have obtained permission from the person listed above to manage his/her DNA data" (the "his/her" in this message suggests that there is no automatic checking that the gender of the DNA data matches the gender of the person in the GEDCOM file);
click the purple Save button;
this reports "DNA kit FT-FFFFFF has been successfully associated with" but before you start to believe the "successfully" bit, you may need to get one of the DNA subject's matches to confirm that you have selected the correct namesake from the GEDCOM file;
finally, click the purple Close button.

Viewing one's match list and contacting matches is free, but as of 21 June 2019, MyHeritage was demanding a USD29 fee from new customers for access to the pedigree charts of matches and other essential features including shared matches. There are occasional periods when uploads get all the features without paying this fee. One such period was the week of 11-18 December 2019. This may have been a reaction to the sale of the GEDmatch website announced on 10 December 2019.

MyHeritage's policy of demanding money to display the pedigree charts linked to DNA kits is unpleasant for two reasons:

No royalties are paid to the donors of those trees if their matches succumb to the financial demands.
Unnecessary queries are generated from matches who refuse to succumb to the financial demands, placing an unwelcome additional burden on those who have already gone out of their way to provide all necessary information in the most straightforward way to their matches, by donating their GEDCOM files to MyHeritage.

After uploading 20 kits during the free period in December 2019, I found myself bombarded with MyHeritage messages, with no time to draft a form response, or to investigate how to publish that form response where matches will see it before sending me messages.

I have not figured out how to share my own MyHeritage match list without sharing passwords; nor have I figured out how to share passwords without triggering email warnings to the password owner every time it is used.

People who visit my own match list without being logged in see this message:

The page you were trying to visit has been specified as off limits by the Site manager

which appears to mean:

The page you were trying to visit has NOT been specified as ON limits by the Site manager.

I would love to know how to specify it as on limits; please let me know if you figure out how to do this.

Step 3: Sharing your pedigree chart

The usefulness of DNA results in identifying previously unknown ancestors is vastly increased when they are directly connected to a pedigree chart showing the already known direct ancestors of the DNA subject, even if this goes no further back than parents, grandparents or greatgrandparents.

Your pedigree chart must be uploaded, by yourself or by a more experienced genealogist (if you are lucky enough to have one helping you), to every website on which your DNA results appear.

In fact, this is an essential part of the process, except for adoptees who start out not knowing anything about their birth parents.

One can see in 30 seconds by comparing two online pedigree charts something that could otherwise takes several days of exchange of emails to find.

If you wish, yourself and any of your ancestors who are still living can be marked as "Private" in your pedigree chart. Even if only one generation of deceased ancestors is included, that will usually be enough to enable the more experienced genealogists amongst your matches to trace additional generations of your ancestry and work out how they are related to you. In fact, sharing information on a limited number of ancestors with your DNA matches is a great way of getting a more complete and detailed family tree compiled, completely free of charge, by someone else!

The more clues that you give a DNA match who is a good genealogical researcher, the more likely you are to entice the match into researching your ancestors on your behalf. The match may have personal knowledge, research skills and/or access to online or offline resources which you do not have, so may make discoveries that you could never have made on your own.

On the other hand, the more clues that you give a DNA match who is a bad genealogical researcher and who has confused your ancestor with a namesake, the more difficult it will become to disentangle the facts from the fiction and to separate the two namesakes. Striking the appropriate balance is not easy, but I like to withhold at least one small fact or hypothesis or to throw in one question to which I am fairly sure I already know the answer, in the hope that the other party will be able to provide independent confirmation of the family history.

Your initial pedigree chart can be replaced with an updated version from time to time as new information about your ancestors is discovered.

In fact, if everybody shared what they knew by sharing pedigree charts, then there would be no need for email queries. The only need for email contact would be to alert people to actual breakthroughs in confirming relationships.

Conversely, sending email to a DNA match with no obvious relationship who has no knowledge of his or her ancestry or who is unable or unwilling to share his or her knowledge is unlikely to elicit any useful additional information.

In other words, the main reason to initiate email correspondence should be to volunteer new information, not to request information.

Unless your DNA matches can see the gaps in your full clear pedigree chart, they will not realise what information you are missing, and will not think of volunteering that information.

With millions of people in the DNA databases and many people managing kits for multiple family members, this philosophy is the only way to keep the volume of DNA-related emails to manageable proportions.

Unfortunately, the DNA comparison websites generally make it easier to send a message to a DNA match than to find the match's pedigree chart. The design philosophy of these websites should be that the user must be required to look at (or look for) a match's pedigree chart BEFORE being invited to contact the match.

Some people share lists of unlinked ancestral surnames on DNA websites, and this is even encouraged by FamilyTreeDNA.com, but a surname list alone is not enough. For a start, a surname list does not reveal from which ancestral surnames you inherited your X-DNA, Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA. A pedigree chart makes this immediately obvious.

Rather than waste your time entering your surnames manually, you should record your pedigree chart in a format known as GEDCOM using standard genealogy software and upload the GEDCOM file, from which the FTDNA surname list should be automatically populated. However, FTDNA announced a bug-ridden "New Version of myFamilyTree" on 18 November 2019, although it appears to have since been renamed "myTREE" on the main menu. I consider anything that was in the old version and that was widely used and appreciated by FTDNA customers, but which is not in the new version, to be a bug, not a feature, although FTDNA appears to disagree with some of my judgements. The unannounced removal of the automatic population of the surname list by GEDCOM upload is by far the most serious of these bugs, as it makes it impossible for customers to use FTDNA for genealogical research. Many FTDNA customers undoubtedly carried on blissfully unaware that the surname lists displayed on their match lists were now incomplete. Searching the match list for a surname does not search the ancestors of the matches, although even this would be a very poor substitute for the display of highlighted shared surnames in the Ancestral Surnames column of the match list. FTDNA's major competitors (AncestryDNA and MyHeritage) both provide this search of matches' ancestors as a basic, and quite indispensible, feature. This feature was still broken as of 2 April 2020, despite numerous requests to the FTDNA helpdesk to fix it.

In order to share your pedigree chart, you must record your ancestors using genealogical software. There are many software options to choose from. The most important feature to check for is whether your chosen software can export a selected subset of individuals (such as all your direct ancestors).

Good genealogy software allows you to tick a box to indicate whether an individual is living or deceased, even if you do not know the date or place of death. It then allows you to export a GEDCOM without the details of living individuals.

Other genealogy software may have a built-in algorithm to guess whether individuals are living or deceased, but some of these algorithms are very poor.

I use the paid version of Ancestral Quest, which uses one of these built-in algorithms, but there are many alternatives.

Bad genealogy software may be more primitive and have:

no facility to export GEDCOM files at all (e.g. the old FamilyTreeDNA.com Family Tree editor to which GEDCOM export was not added until late 2019);
a free version with no facility to export GEDCOM files and a paid version with such a facility (e.g. tribalpages.com);
a facility to export the entire database to a GEDCOM file, but no facility to select just a subset of individuals for inclusion (e.g. ancestry.com); or
a facility to export to a GEDCOM file, but no facility to distinguish between the details included for living and deceased individuals.

While I strongly recommend using standalone desktop genealogy software to create your GEDCOM file, this can also be done using the AncestryDNA website or various similar websites. However, if you choose to maintain the master copy of your family tree on a website, then you will have to download your GEDCOM file, both

as a backup in case the "cloud" where the website is stored evaporates with all your hard work; and
in order to upload it to other DNA websites.

If you do not have the basic genealogical knowledge, computer hardware and technical skills required to create a GEDCOM file, then the genealogist in your family may be able and willing to help.
Your own favourite genealogy software should allow you to create a GEDCOM file containing whichever individuals you wish from your family tree.

You may include whichever individuals you wish in the file, but I recommend that you create a single GEDCOM file, including all of those individuals whose DNA kits you manage and all of the direct ancestors of each of them, and including just the basic, but essential, names, dates and places for these individuals. Other individuals and other details of your direct ancestors are initially irrelevant to your DNA matches. You can include any additional individuals that you wish in your GEDCOM file, but I have found that including additional individuals has many disadvantages. It increases the file size, may confuse your matches, slows processing and display and risks offending living individuals who may not wish to be included due to concerns about privacy. (Many financial institutions and other bodies work on the assumption that genealogical information about an individual that an experienced genealogist can locate in seconds is known only to that individual; one should of course avoid doing business with such institutions.) Furthermore, some of the DNA websites will sell the information that you donate as hints to their other customers, will pay you no royalties for this information, and will thereby cause any possible errors in your research to go viral.

Unfortunately, many individuals have linked their DNA data to individuals in a GEDCOM file other than the DNA subject. I have seen examples where the DNA websites have allowed the DNA data to be linked to the opposite-sex spouse of the DNA subject, or to an ancestor of the DNA subject who has been dead for centuries, since long before the commercial availability of DNA analysis. The fewer individuals in the GEDCOM file, the less likely the DNA data is to be inadvertently attached to the wrong individual. In one case where the DNA was linked to the spouse of the DNA subject, it turned out that I knew the identity of the DNA subject's grandfather, which had been concealed from her, but the error delayed this discovery for many months.

Most of the websites which display GEDCOM files use algorithms which attempt to identify potentially living individuals, whose names are then displayed as "HIDDEN" or "Private" or "LIVING" or "Person Not Viewable" or some such term in place of their real names. Hence, your GEDCOM file will be of little use to your DNA matches unless it goes back to at least one generation of deceased ancestors and includes details of their deaths. The algorithms to identify living individuals often do not look beyond the facts associated with the individual himself or herself, so that ancestors with no death details but with children born hundreds of years ago are deemed to be living by some of these algorithms.

If you wish to choose a subset of your database and your software does not permit this, then you can always install better software, such as Ancestral Quest, which I use, or probably RootsMagic or Reunion or Family Tree Builder or any of the numerous other programs listed on Wikipedia. Apart from Ancestral Quest, I have not checked which of these products allows the export of a GEDCOM file including just one or more selected individuals and all of their known direct ancestors. The free version of Ancestral Quest both imports and exports GEDCOM files. You can continue to use your existing software for data entry, but use the new software merely to import your full GEDCOM, select the relevant individuals and details, and export the desired subset of your information.

Likewise, if you have some of your ancestors in one genealogy database and others in a different genealogy database (for example, your paternal ancestors in one and your maternal ancestors in another), good genealogy software will allow you to import the relevant individuals from each of the databases into a single merged database and to link the different parts of your pedigree chart together before exporting the full pedigree chart for use on the DNA comparison websites.

Once you have a GEDCOM file, it must be linked to your DNA results (and the DNA results of other relatives which you manage) at GEDmatch.com, FamilyTreeDNA.com, MyHeritage.com AND AncestryDNA as relevant.
Your DNA results will not attract the attention of those who may be in a position to help you if they are not connected to what you already know about your ancestors.

When you upload your pedigree chart to MyHeritage.com and/or AncestryDNA, it will be effectively resold to their paying subscribers who are deemed to be amongst your matches, but you will receive no royalties. If you are prepared to donate your pedigree chart to these commercial organisations, then you should also be prepared to make it freely available directly to your matches using GEDmatch.com.

It is not practical for me to include and maintain here full up-to-date instructions on how to create the required GEDCOM file from all of the myriad of genealogy software packages and websites on the market. Here are some examples:

Ancestral Quest Version 14.00.32: On the File menu, select Export.
From the "Export for import into" dropdown menu, select "Other".
If you wish, untick all the "Include" checkboxes except "Names on Living".
In the "Selected Individuals" pane, select the Partial button (Alt-P) and the Select button (Alt-S).
Find the DNA subject.
In the "Selections by Relationship" pane, choose Ancestors on the dropdown menu and the Select button (Alt-S). Set "Descendant generations" to zero and make sure the "Include spouses" and "Include all parents" boxes are not ticked.
Select OK, OK and Export
Save the file and note carefully where you are saving it so that you will be able to find it again when you want to upload it elsewhere.
Ancestry.com: Go to the Family Trees page.
Find and select the "Manage tree" link for the relevant tree.
Find and select the green "Export tree" link towards the bottom of the right-hand column.; Wait until it becomes a green "Download your GEDCOM file" link and select that
Save the file and note carefully where you are saving it so that you will be able to find it again when you want to upload it elsewhere.
FamilySearch.org: Familysearch.org apparently does not allow you to save your work directly in GEDCOM format.
Instead, you must import from the website into your compatible desktop genealogy software and then export from there to GEDCOM.
Choose one of the Family Tree Management programs.
Again, I use Ancestral Quest Version 14.00.32 as an example.
First, go to the Tools menu and select Preferences, FamilySearch, Enable FamilySearch features.
Close and restart Ancestral Quest.
Then go to the new FamilySearch menu and select Import Family Lines, Sign In, Import (i.e. Download My Ancestors, or choose whatever individuals you want to import).
[This takes a while, so go and do something else until it completes.]
Now follow the standard instructions above for Ancestral Quest.

Some people find it disconcerting that others publish nonsense online masquerading as family trees. Some websites hosting family trees facilitate the dissemination of such nonsense by failing to implement basic error checking, such as ensuring that a child is born after its parents. Some websites even encourage the copying of such nonsense by some customers from others by a system of "hints", so that the nonsense quickly goes viral. Those whose family trees and photographs are copied into such online nonsense can be reluctant to leave their information online. Just because some people misuse or abuse a good service is no reason for others to refuse to use it properly. Those with qualms about publishing all their genealogical research online should be reassured by the principle that only basic information on the direct ancestors of DNA subjects is required for very effective use of the DNA comparison websites.