FTDNA – new chromosome browser

Roberta Estes has once again been very timely reviewing the new chromosome browser some of us saw for the first time yesterday!

Family Tree DNA’s New Chromosome Browser

FTDNA projects – Privacy settings

One of the great strengths of FTDNA is the opportunity to participate in surname,  geographical, Y-DNA, mtDNA and Wikitree projects managed by volunteer administrators.

If you are a member of a FTDNA project, you might need to revise your privacy settings after FTDNA brought in its new privacy policy and established “Project Preferences”.

You can find “Privacy and Sharing” if you hover your cursor over your name in the top right hand side. Click the tab “Project Preferences”. For the administrators in each project of which you are a member you can “Grant full access”, “Grant limited access” or apply “Group Project Access Only”.

FTDNA has created different default settings for different projects, and some of these defaults do not work for the administrators, especially if they are “Group Project Access Only”.

If an administrator of one of your project hasn’t been in touch already to advise you of the appropriate privacy setting for their project, it might be an idea to contact them and find out.

 

St Patrick’s Day DNA sales

I’m still catching up from the wonderful (and exhausting) time that was Congress 2018.

Catching up on emails I’ve just noticed that many of the DNA companies have St Patrick’s Day sales (certainly FTDNA, Ancestry & MyHeritage).

I would guess there would be sales leading up to Mother’s Day in May, as well as US Father’s Day (June), DNA day, …

Kerry

Valentine’s Day sales

Most of the companies are offering Valentine’s Day DNA sales, some just for a week or so, some until the end of February. See Thomas MacEntee’s post about it here or check out your favourite testing company.

Kerry

Vouchers – Last week of FTDNA Holiday Sale

I have heaps of vouchers for additional discounts in the FamilyTreeDNA 2017 Holiday Sale and am happy to give them away. Just email me on 61discovery61@gmail.com and let me know the ones you’d like. They are valid until midnight 31 Dec 17, Houston time.

All in US dollars:

• $5 off any purchase of $39 or more
• $10 off any purchase of $100 or more
• $20 off any purchase of $175 or more
• $50 off any purchase of $350 or more
• $75 off any purchase of $475 or more.

Ancestry vs FTDNA – where to test first?

A couple of people asked this question on Saturday, so here’s a timely response from Roberta Estes from her blog DNAeXplained.

Australian Citizens on FTDNA

I’ve just come across a project on FTDNA called “Australian Citizens” – describing itself as “This project is for all who class themselves as Australians (and their families whether living currently in Australia or elsewhere)”.

While primarily for those who’ve done Y-DNA or mtDNA tests, there are also many there only with autosomal results. Apparently you can join the project even if you’ve transferred results from another company. It’s intended to be another way to filter out all the other countries’ testers and find the other Aussies.

It also seems to be another avenue for Q&A. By the way, anybody who is on Facebook should consider joining the groups “Genetic Genealogy Tips & Techniques” and also “Using DNA for Genealogy – Australia & NZ”.

However this blog is also intended for Q&A, as well as for disseminating information.

Looking forward to hearing from you, somewhere
Kerry

Family Tree DNA Christmas sale is here

Family Tree DNA have just announced their Christmas sale prices, valid until 31 December.

All prices are US$ plus postage:
Family Finder (autosomal DNA, ie cousin finding, back to shared ancestors up to 5 or 6 generations ago) – $59
Y-37 (37 markers, father’s fathers back many generations) – $129     (Y-67 $229, Y-111 $299)
mtDNA full sequence (available to all, traces mother’s mothers back many generations) – $169

There are also bundles available on sale, eg Family Finder + Y-37 etc).

The other companies are bound to have pre-Christmas sales, maybe separate to (or not) “Black Friday” sales (Friday 24 November).

If there’s anyone you’re thinking of testing – or wanting to encourage to test, now is a good time!

Kerry

The Triangulator

Roberta Estes’ post today is “Introducing the Triangulator” – a new tool designed to triangulate segments on FamilyTreeDNA’s “Family Finder” matches.

The tool is extremely easy to install and to use, but you do need to know something about what triangulation is and how it can help you. Roberta’s blog post has some links to help you with that. As she says

In a nutshell, triangulation provides you with a tool to show that not only do person A and B match you, on the same segment, but that they also match each other.

After installing the tool into Chrome (very easy – follow Roberta’s instructions), I logged in to FTDNA -> “Family Finder” -> “Matches” and then selected somebody (“Dorothy”) whose relationships I’ve been trying to explore. I then chose “In common with”.

The resulting list was supposedly people who matched both me and also Dorothy. I selected some of those and then clicked on the new “dnagen tools” -> “triangulator” tool and it produced a list of how those people did or did not relate to Dorothy & I and also to each other and where their DNA triangulated.

Very easy to use and useful information.

Kerry

Comparing Living DNA results with Ancestry and/or FTDNA

A possible relation has tested with Living DNA and we’re trying to determine how we can compare his results with those from AncestryDNA and FamilyTreeDNA. Normally we would load results from different testing companies into GEDMatch. It looks like this is not possible with Living DNA. Has anyone figured this out?