
Sometimes the DNA Match Game (as we discussed last summer) is not that much fun! My new client this week was in despair over her thousands of matches on MyHeritage. She is looking for a missing paternal ancestor. How should she differentiate and exclude the maternal from the paternal? MyHeritage wants you to triangulate between the matches and figure out the inheritance by shared segments.
MyHeritage has a great database, especially for European matches. But Ancestry's parentage differentiation can be accomplished in a couple of mouse clicks. You identify which side is your mother's (click), and which is your father's (click), label them (click, click) and then sort your matches in the "Groups" tab (click). Voila!
Then color code your matches with Dots by couple as we talked about in last year's DNA Match Game post.
How to compare Ancestry matches with your MyHeritage (or FamilyTreeDNA, etc.,) matches? How to figure out how people without trees fit into your tree? You need a Leeds Chart! Make yourself a table or a chart in your favorite software program and collect your cousins and their shared matches.
I like to include the shared cM's with a match's name. Each match gets a row. Assign your first match, here "90 cM," a color in the next column. and everyone else who is a shared match with 90cM gets the same color in the same column. Next, give 200 cM another color in the next column, and everyone who shares with that cousin gets the same color in that same column. When working on my own brick wall I had to use as few as 20 cM shared matches. Use whatever works for your particular family tree!
90 cM Cousin | ||||
200 cM Cousin | ||||
300 cM Cousin | ||||
150 cM Cousin |
Hopefully, you chart will be much much longer than this example! This will help you sort out who belongs with whom so you can color code them with the right Dots or Tags in both Ancestry and MyHeritage.
For much more detailed instructions on Leeds Method Charting, check out YourDNAGuide by Diahan Southard, or the actual woman who invented the system, Dana Leeds, at this link https://www.danaleeds.com/the-leeds-method/.
How's your research going? Are you having luck with your DNA Match Game? Can I help you? Send me an email and let's tackle that brick wall! It's too hot to go outside after noon, lots of time for Genealogy!
Regards,
Leslie Ryan
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"The Match Game" is a TV Game show that began running in the US in 1962 and has run off and on with updates through this century, wherein contestants try to match fill in the blank question answers with a panel of celebrities. Reruns appear daily here in the US on the Game Show Network on cable TV providers.