I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed. My mother’s Ancestry DNA matches were over 55,000, I had uploaded the DNA to Family Tree DNA and also planned to use GEDMatch for more matches as well. I found out about DNAGedcom and thought it was going to be a great help (which it is!), but was still trying to figure out how to deal with spreadsheet organization for combining all the various segment matching.
And then, I stumbled across a comment on a blog that mentioned Genome Mate Pro. Ooh, what’s that? Well apparently the solution to what was beginning to feel like a giant problem brewing. GMP will pull all of your match information and chromosome matching information from a variety of places together in one database with a tools to help you keep it all organized. This sounded promising. And it’s free! They do ask for donations, and I will certainly be contributing, but if you are tight on cash after shelling out money for the actual DNA tests, this is a good way to get organized without costing a lot of additional money.
After downloading and installing the program, a dialog box pops up on first run, advising that the application is complicated and to watch the tutorial videos and read the user manual. And over and over again, the concept of making backups at various stages is highly emphasized. And they weren’t kidding. One, if you have as much data from several places like me, loading all that into the database takes time, like several hours for me. And two, it’s possible to make mistakes with merging and tagging the chromosome segments, so having a backup from before you started making those mistakes can be super helpful. I can only assume rebuilding the database is not a fun task.
To get the information in GMP, I used DNAGedcom Client to gather my matches from both Ancestry and FTDNA. I followed the well documented instructions on gathering the outputs from GedMatch as well to have that data. Be sure to use Google Chrome for obtaining GedMatch data. Neither Firefox or Edge properly formatted when copying the output and cause errors. Lesson learned!
As a computer nerd, I haven’t yet found a program I can’t eventually master. It’s just one of my gifts. But I will say this is not an application for a person who isn’t computer literate. It’s not what I would consider intuitive, but it is highly functional once you understand the quirks. So yes, read the manual, watch the videos and join the Facebook Support Group. And have patience. I’m catching on pretty quickly, but I’m far from a typical end user.
What I’m loving so far – the organization of my matches! If a match has their data on multiple sites, I can merge them into one combined match and track everything one time. I can tag matches to see at a glance who I have contacted, who I’m actively analyzing, and who we’ve found to be common ancestors. If the user has uploaded their tree to Ancestry or FTDNA, it will bring down shared surnames to search and even the ability to compare surnames between triangulated matches.
I’m just starting to dig into individual chromosome viewing and triangulation, but the ability to see graphically what segments are shared between matches. I haven’t yet decided how I want to group the triangulations I find, mainly because I don’t have quite enough known matches to specific ancestors to have a plan with that. Plus most of the known ones are still related on both paternal and maternal side to my mother.
I haven’t figured out enough about the segment map yet as well. I can see how that will ultimately be useful, but since I don’t have enough of my segments specifically assigned to an ancestor, it’s not much at this time. But I have seen some pretty colorful screenshots of people who do have this filled considerably.
I customized the form email to direct matches I contact to the surname section of this blog. I had a couple of already known cousins on GEDMatch that showed up, so I looked at their shared segments with my mother and checked for triangulations with matches in the database. Then I started sending out emails to those matches to verify my theories about which ancestor gave us those segments. I’ve already received some responses and have been able to tag specific segments to certain ancestors. Plus I’ve found some wonderful new information that I’ll share in a future post.
All in all, while it is a pretty complicated application, the ability to sort all these matches without reinventing the wheel with my own database or spreadsheet is fantastic. It may not enable me to solve every brick wall in my tree, but it is already putting some dents in them!
***FTC Disclaimer – I received no compensation for this review. Mentions of any companies or their products is also done without compensation from those or their agents.
Just Another Tree Branch 