CVGS DNA Interest Group 21 November Meeting Notes

The second CVGS DNA Interest Group meeting was on 21 November at the Chula Vista Civic Center Branch Library in the Conference Room.  17 members were in attendance.

Randy demonstrated and discussed AncestryDNA for most of the meeting, including:

*  Settings, and downloading your raw DNA in a ZIP file for upload to another DNA provider.

*  Ethnicity Estimate -- Regions (reference groups), Migrations, and Timeline.  AncestryDNA recently changed and added to their Regions definitions, and now has 15,000 reference group profiles in 350 regions.

*  DNA Circles -- these include descendants from your common ancestors who have an Ancestry Member Tree with your ancestors.  They may not be a DNA Match with you, but are with other DNA Circle members.  A user can see the relationship paths from the common ancestors to themself and to the DNA Circle member.

*  New Ancestor Discoveries -- these are historical persons that may have common ancestors in the trees of DNA Matches with you.  I've never found a tree match.

*  DNA Matches -- these are persons who have a DNA match of at least 6 centiMorgans with you.  The user can search Matches by surname and location; can see how much DNA is shared with a match; can view "Shared Ancestor" matches (a green leaf Hint, with relationship path for you and the match); can view "All Matches" (ordered by amount of shared centiMorgans for each match); can view "Shared Matches" in a list (other matches who share a DNA segment with you and your specific match); indication if a match has a public Ancestry Member Tree, a private tree, an unlinked tree, or no tree at all (you can review public trees and unlinked trees); view a Matches Map on the "All Matches" page.

For each match, the user can Compare ethnicities, send a message, add or edit a Note, and explore available trees to try to find common ancestors.  I use the MedBetter DNA Chrome extension to display my Notes on the All Matches page.

*  Creating a Quick and Dirty Ancestry tree to find common ancestors from public trees or unlinked trees - see Blaine Bettinger's YouTube video here.  I do this in one private unsearchable trees using Ancestry's search capabilities, starting from someone in a Match's tree.

*  To keep track of your AncestryDNA matches, I use a spreadsheet to list Match user name, amount of shared DNA in cM, number of segments, if they have a tree, if they are in another set of DNA matches (like MyHeritage or GEDMatch), and if I have added their line to my RootsMagic tree.

The next DNA Interest Group meeting will be Wednesday, 19 December at 12 noon in the Conference Room at the Chula Vista Civic Center Branch Library (365 F Street, Chula Vista, CA).