The Tool Order for Beginners

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Many people have asked, if you’re just getting started with the GEDmatch, which tools should you be using? So I’m gonna go over four tools today in the order that you should be using them. Howdy, welcome the family History fanatics where we love helping you climb your family tree and have fun along the way. GEDmatch has a lot of tools and gonna be overwhelming. Now, I’ve created videos on how to use lots of the different specific tools and hopefully I’ll get through all of them this year. But if you’re just getting started with GEDmatch and you wanna know which ones should I be using first? Then I’m going to talk about four tools today and the order that you should be going and using them. Now, the first tool that I want to talk about is the are your parents related?

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So let’s go and take a look at where you can find this tool. If we go over to the GEDmatch page, you can see that the are your parents related tool is right here. Now, why would you want to use this tool? Well, you can watch the video that shows more about this, but in essence what you want to do is you want to identify whether or not you’re going to have problems sorting your matches. The majority of people have matches that can be sorted into two columns. Those that are related to your father and those that are related to your mother. In other words, you inherited that DNA through one of those two lines. Unfortunately, for those whose parents are somewhat closely related, now this could be second, third, fourth, fifth cousins where you end up sharing a little bit of DNA that you got from both your mother and father.

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Then you may have matches that could be from either one and you don’t know which one because you got that same DNA from both your mother and your father. But like I said, the majority of people do not have this problem. You’re probably gonna come up with no, they’re not related. And then you know going forward that you don’t have to worry about whether they might be in both or if they’re one or the other. Now the next tool after you’ve figured out that you don’t have any problems or that you maybe do have a problem is the one to mini list. And this is the shared match, or this is the match list. This is the people who match you with DNA. Now in GEDmatch, the one to many is a real quick and dirty way to analyze it. So the numbers on that are not necessarily going to be exactly accurate, but we’ll get into that in a second. What you can do from this list is you can identify those who you are most closely related to. Now you can find this tool on GEDmatch and it’s

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Going to be this one right here. There’s two of them. There’s the beta, and then there’s just the DNA comparison. I would almost always use the beta. It gives a lot more information and I think it’s organized better. So with this match list, now you are gonna be able to start to focus where you want to do your research, which matches you want to look at because you know which ones are mostly most closely related to you. I would typically start with those that are share at least 50 centimorgans or more and strive to identify who they are and how they’re related to you. Once you’ve exhausted that list, then you can start to look at some of the others. But this is a good starting point and it actually is a segue into the next one. The third tool is the people who match both or one of two kits.

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Now, I mentioned before that matches usually fall into a maternal side or a paternal side. Well, this tool is going to help you to start to divide those matches up. It’s a way to sort your matches into groups. So for instance, let’s say that you have a cousin that you know that has tested and has uploaded their DNA to GEDmatch. If you do a match both, then what you will find is you’ll find a list of people that you and your cousin both match. Now you happen to know that your cousin is related through your mother because your cousin is the son of your mother’s sister. Well, that means that list that matched both of you is all related through your mother. They’re all maternal cousins. So you’ve already now taken a big group of your matches and them as maternal. You can do this with second cousins, third cousins, and really anybody that you know how they’re related to you, that shared match list tells you that they’re on a certain side of your family tree.

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When we go over to GEDmatch, we can find the people who match both or one of two kits tool right here. What you want to do then is you wanna start taking those matches from the most closely related to you from the one to many match list. And for each one of those closely rated, you want to be running this one or ma people who match both of those kits. And that way you can see well, which ones start to group together. And if you actually know the relationship of any of those kits, then you can actually assign them as, this is my paternal or my paternal, or this is my paternal grandfather

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Or my maternal grandmother. However you know that relationship, you are going to be able to start grouping these and seeing which DNA matches go together. And now you’re actually able to start to do some research into these different people. Before we continue, if you want to support us, there are many ways that you can help out in the description below our links to our show notes, to the blogs, to free guides, as well as information on how to join fhf Extra. The most important thing you can do is leave a comment, share this video with your friend and click the like button. We grow thanks to support from members like you. And with that, you’re gonna go to the fourth tool. Once you have a better idea of how somebody is related to you and maybe some of the other matches that are related to them, it’s time to start looking deeper into this match.

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This tool is going to give you the details, specific details about that match. So it’s not only gonna show you how much you match, but it’s gonna show you which chromosome you match on where that segment is located on that chromosome. Now this can be used in conjunction with this group or these groups that you’ve looked at. When you look at each one of them, do you see anything in common? For instance, hey, you know five of these people all share a segment that is the same in this, on this chromosome that everybody else does. That’s an indication that you all received that segment from the same common ancestor. Now, the bigger the segments are, the more closely related that ancestor might be, although not always. So that should help get you started. Now, if you want to watch each one of the videos for these individual tools, then they are in the description below. Start with the are your parents related, then start with, then go to the match, list the one too many. With that, we’re gonna start using the matches, both kits to start to group things and start looking at each individual one with the one to one. If you have any questions, you can put it in the comments below. Now, if you’d like to just get an overview of GEDmatch, you can watch this video up here. If you want to learn something else, then you can watch this video down below.