How to Compare Family Trees on GEDmatch

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Do you have a GEDcom file on GEDmatch? If so, then you can use some of the tools that help you find other people and progress your genealogy.

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Howdy, I’m Andy Lee with Family History Fanatics and this is a segment of DNA. Be sure to subscribe to our channel and click on the bell if you wanna be notified about upcoming episodes. GEDmatch actually started out as a GEDcom matching program. That’s why I got its name, GEDmatch, as opposed to DNA match. Those tools that were first created for matching GEDcom files are still available to use with the power of DNA added to them. So today I’m gonna go over how you can use those tools on GEDmatch. So once you log onto GEDmatch, then you’re going to actually scroll down and you’ll see the GEDcom files that you have uploaded and down a little further are going to be the GEDcom tools. Now we’re gonna go through each one of these tools one at a time so that you can see how you can use these GEDcom files.

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Now the first one that I like to look at really is the search all Jed Coms. Now for this one, you don’t need a GEDcom file of your own. This is searching all of the GEDcom files and there’s about a hundred thousand GEDcom files that have been uploaded to GEDmatch. Now, just like with many of the search databases, you’re just going to put in what information you know about the person that you’re maybe looking for. So you can put in a name, you can put in a place a date of birth, let’s just say 1800, and I’m going to say the United States and maybe that’s all the information. And then clicking on the search is going to have results that are gonna show you where all of the GEDcom files might have been from. So here we have a list of the GEDcom files that match that information and I can click on each one of these GEDcom files to zoom into it.

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So for instance, this is that John Smith, he was born in Kentucky in 1800 and it tells me a little bit about what his parents are or if he has any children who he was married to. And that is all provided with links to the pedigree and links to the descendancy. So if I want to look at the pedigree chart, I can look at the pedigree chart if I want to see, well, what are his descendants? I can see those descendancy charts. So the search all GEDcom is probably really easy to understand and it is just like searches on any other of the genealogy websites, you’re just searching those GEDcom files that people have uploaded. So let’s start looking at some of the others. The first one here is one GEDcom to all. So this is actually going to be searching your GEDcom file to all of the others.

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So you need to make sure that you have your GEDcom file number. I’m just gonna copy that and I’m going to go in and I’m going to search all of these other jed coms. It has me enter my number and then it gives me some options here. Now, depending on how closely I want things to match will depend on whether or not it is actually going to show results. So start off with what the default is, and if you’re getting too many results, then you can change those defaults to limit the number of results that you’re getting. In this case, the GEDcom file that I’ve created here was just a bunch of bogus names and dates, so I don’t expect to have a whole lot of matches because it doesn’t actually match anything in reality. Now this is searching through a hundred thousand GEDcom files, so it may take a little bit before it starts to find some matches for you.

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So let’s look at what a match looks like. You can see here in this first box, this is telling me what the GEDcom file is and it gives me the contact information for that person. It gives me the name of the person that donated that, how many people are in that GEDcom file, and if there’s any DNA kits that are attached to that GEDcom file, then it’s going to show me the people who I match in that GEDcom file. And so you can see that I have a William Brown in my file that was born in 1895 in Missouri, and their GEDcom file has a William Brown also, although this one was from Galveston, it has some parents listed as well. So from this I can decide whether or not this is a match and of what I’ve done is I have clicked on the confirm match and it gives me this information that this match is confirmed.

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Now if I want to, I can remove that confirmation as well. The other thing that this shows is this actually has links to both of our GEDcom files. You can see from these two icons right here. If we go up, it tells you that one of these links is to the descendancy and the other link is to the pedigree. So if I want to look at this William Brown and see some more information, I can just click on this link and it’s gonna open up the pedigree or it’s gonna open up the descendency for that person. So the next tool that you want to look at is the two Jed Coms comparison. And in the two GEDcom comparisons, you need two GEDcom kit numbers. So I’m gonna put in my kit number and that other kit that I just matched, and then I can compare these two kits.

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And what it’s gonna do is it’s gonna go through and it’s going to see all of the matches just between those two kits. So this is a lot quicker than what the other search does because it’s not searching through all hundred thousand of them, it’s just searching through this one kit. And you can see in this one kit, I only have this one match, which I already talked about. And again, it has the same links that if you want to be able to go and look at the pedigree or the descendants of that kit, then you can click on those to be able to see it. Also, if you actually click on the person itself, it’s gonna go to that individual’s page and you’ll be able to see the information attached to that specific individual. The last tool is one of my favorite, and that is the GEDcom plus DNA matches.

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Now for this, what you need is you need a DNA kit number. So I’m going to use one of my DNA kit numbers and we’ll see what this is showing you. Now once the results pop up, what you can see is this is like a match list, like a DNA match list only. It’s a little bit different. It is a DNA match list that only has those matches, which have a GEDcom file attached to them, which is great if you’re looking for certain trees. So you can see as I’m looking down here, I have, these are on my other account for my grandfather and myself or my grandmother. And then there are some other kits for other people and I have their contact information. Now a lot of these DNA names and the GEDcom names are going to be hidden because they are indicated as living people in the GEDcom.

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Usually, the only people that are going to show up are those that are deceased. And so in this case, you can see that my grandfather who’s deceased, he’s listed as deceased in this GEDcom file. And so it shows up with his name on there. Now the reason why I like this so much is because now I can actually go to any of these kits and since I know that they have some pedigree information, I can start to do a quick search to see what matches I might find. I can use those kit numbers with the two GEDcom matching tool to see how similar our GEDcom files are if we have a line that is matching. So those are the tools that GEDmatch has for GEDcom matching. And again, this is what GEDmatch started out as is a GEDcom matching website. And so these tools are really great for analyzing different jed coms and seeing whether or not you have something rather than having to go through each line to see if you have an individual in there. So if you have any questions about how to match GEDcoms on GEDmatch, put it in the comments below and I’ll try to answer it. And if you’d like this video, be sure to give it a thumbs up and make sure you share it with all your friends.