Ancestry DNA has revolutionized the way that we
research and climb our family tree and they have a new
DNA match tool that I want to talk about. Now ancestry allows you to take your DNA
kit and attach it to one tree so DNA
can only be attached to one tree. However one tree can have
more than one DNA kit attached to it, but what happens if you want to have DNA
that is attached to a different tree linked
to your tree? The new tool on ancestry makes that possible. If this
is your first time here welcome! My name is Devon Noel Lee with
Family History Fanatics and if you're new to DNA research I want
you to grab this free guide 'The Answers to the Five Most
Common DNA Questions'. The link will be found in the
description box below and in fact all links that I mention to other videos
and other resources will be in the show notes that you'll
find in that box. What this new linking tool for your match-list does
is allow you to go and find your relatives
and tell yourself I know that this person on my DNA match list
matches a specific person on my family tree that I have built
on Ancestry. And the advantage of this little icon
besides allowing you to visually see the progress of your research,
it allows you to click on this icon and jump
to that person's tree. And in short what happens is now you can link
your tree to the DNA of other people without bumping into the rule that DNA
can only be attached to one tree. So here we have
my DNA match list and I have started to tag a number of my
relatives. As i'm scrolling down I find one
of my relatives who is not in my tree so we're going to go to David
Geisler. If I click on his name in this view you can see this icon that
allows me to link this person to someone in my
tree, but first let me see how we are related
who is our most recent common ancestor? Well our most recent common ancestor is
Henry Joseph and Margaret Magdalena
and that is where on his tree he has them
and then I have them one more generation back because i'm actually
younger than this man and my generation's a little bit one
generation below, but this is our most recent common ancestor.
So I actually have my distant cousin David in my family tree
and I can come over here and start typing David
and my tree and when I click on that name all of a sudden this icon changes
color and I can view in the tree if I ever
need to break the link. Like I don't want them in my tree anymore for whatever
reason or it was a mistake then I can click
remove right here. So if I view in the tree then
ancestry takes me right to where he's located on my family tree.
I can also see that there's a DNA icon right there and we can go
back and forth between the two profiles. So I can go to
my match-list and I can go to the view profile and we're right back
here to the shared match list. Now back on this profile page we can see
that David's name has been updated to have the icon
right beside it that I have connected him to my tree.
Do what happens when you have a DNA match
that did not have a tree online like this Eric. I've actually met Eric
and he doesn't have a tree online, but you have added them to your tree.
Well what happens then? Well let me walk you through the process.
So we're going to click on their name and we're going to click on that icon
and once again we're going to start typing their name
and there they are and we can go back and forth between
their tree. And he has the icon updated. Now what happens if
they are not yet in your tree and you discover that they
should be in your tree, what do you do then?
Well in that case let's scroll up to Jeffrey Howard Merritt. Now Jeffrey
recently took a DNA test and he has an unlinked
tree. So if we go click on him on link tree you
can tell I already know how he's related. So he has a public tree and he is the
grandson of Dorothy Ann einsteinium and Dorothy is
very instrumental in getting me started in
genealogy because she shared a lot of data with my
mother in 1975 and everything I've inherited from my Canadians
I got from Dorothy Ann Zumstein. So she's really awesome
and i'm glad that Jeffrey does have his tree
this little partial tree online. So what do I do
in order to get the link to work i'm gonna have to build out
from Dorothy to Jeffrey. Now I need to come down and add a relative
for the purpose of this video i'm just gonna add
there was a sign and we're just gonna say
anonymous and then below the anonymous I know who it is, but i'm
not letting you know who it is. I'm going to add the son Jeffrey yeah
not a spouse a son.
So i'm gonna add Jeffrey and now I can go back
over here click on this icon type Jeffrey
and I can connect to Jeffrey and when I go back to my DNA
match list Jeffrey is connected and there
it goes through, pretty slick. One thing to keep in mind if you do add
living people to the ancestry tree, ancestry will
automatically privatize their information.
So only you when you log in can see the information
about living people, but when other people access your tree
even if it is a public tree no one will be able to see all the details about the
living person. So do keep that in mind. So that's how you do it let's
talk about should you use it, what are the some
great things about it, and maybe not so great things about it that people have
been discovering since this tool has been out since
early 2020. So my colleague Larry Jones who put
this video out in May the question Larry posed
that I agree with the most. His answer was does this linking tool
help your research? And the jury's still out on this.
Now what Larry says and if you have never seen
Larry on camera you'll want to check out this video
interview that we did with him where he actually showed his face.
A number of followers over on DNA Family Tree really enjoyed that series so be
sure to check it out. You will have to sign up
to FHF Extra and all the information is in the description.
But what Larry said was that the gene ancestry DNA
linking tool for him right now is a lot of busy work.
Now if he was actively working on a question, which
you might be, you might not find it so busy,
but if you're a little casual right now if you're on break
he's not completely motivated that this is
a game changer just yet. The jury's still out and I tend to
agree. Now a number of people have complained
that you cannot have your tree that you go
and connect all of the links to other people's trees
be reflected in the trees of others that you manage.
So now you have to do all of your tree linking and then
all of the trees that you also manage and it becomes a lot of busy work.
So I don't know, what do you think? Let me know, I personally didn't jump up
and down with this tool because for me I find
more value like I shared with you in this video. Color code your DNA matches
by using these colored dots this tells me where people are linked
and then I use a lot of notes. So I guess this is a way to navigate to
where those people are quickly and back and forth which
brings me to my next problem. In my blog post
and reduce your Unnecessarily Large Family Tree
I talk about my strategy for using paid service programs versus using the One
World Family Tree over Family Search which is
free. You could also use WikiTree for this as well, but I build my large
family trees over on FamilySearch and then I have a research
tree on ancestry. Typically I like to combine
the records in the DNA, but if we're supposed to as some
big fans of this service say they build everybody out like every DNA
connection they have they try to match them into their tree,
but then I am going to lose my mind because ancestry gives me tree hints. And
when I am struggling to do genealogy
and I need a little pick-me-up or i'm working on a brick wall and I want to
just do something casual well then i'll go look in my hint feature
and I will go through and just start working the hints. So i'll go through and
and work this person and this person, but the more
people that I put into the family tree on ancestry the more
hints I'm gonna have and it's gonna drive me
crazy. Are you like me or are you vastly
different I would really like to know. So what's
my solution if i'm going to take advantage of this
DNA aspect and still keep my sanity for my research. Well
I think then the only solution is to have
two trees on ancestry and you can do that.
I actually have several trees on ancestry I have my
Geiszler Brown tree, I have a project tree that I have, I have my Uncle Bob Street,
and I have several others that I throw on from
time to time when i'm working on a project.
So i'm on the fence whether I really want to jump up and do this,
but the only solution then in order to do all the DNA matches would be to have
a research tree and or
a DNA tree in my research tree and my DNA tree.
I guess it would have to be a public tree without sources
which is going to make other genealogists think i'm not a good
researcher, but i don't want to manage sources in multiple places.
But i would have all of my family lines
and I would ignore any hints that come up through this tree
and it would just be genetic so I have my grandmother, who was adopted, so i'd only
put the DNA relatives. We had some DNA surprises so I would
only put the biological relationships in this tree and I
wouldn't have the record relationships just the biological
relationships and then I would know that when i'm
working in history i'm only using it to build a tree and
get all these third fourth and fifth living people
cousins thrown into that tree and call it good and then I would have to have
another tree which would be my research tree
and it could have biological and genealogical but the emphasis of this
tree would be the genealogical data with a little bit
of the DNA thrown in as I find the caveats and the surprises and get them
all untangled in that way and this way I can focus on
my relatives specific relatives. So let's use my surname table chart
and if you've never seen a surname table chart if you haven't built one yet
hold on a minute and I will show you where you can learn more about it,
but this is my surname table. This is my four great grandparents, but this is the
adopted line. So in that first tree the DNA tree I
would have to exclude everybody here and then there are some oopsies along
some of these lines and so I kind of have to exclude them
and any other times. Let's say this was an oopsie line a DNA surprise line
I would have to exclude all of them just to focus on the
biological portions of the tree and then if I just want to do the genealogical
tree then I can do everybody here, but
remember I want to do targeted targeted research.
So as much as I love these folks and I claim them as my ancestors
i'm only really researching these guys i'm researching my
Townsends, which also picks up a Lynch i'm researching. Actually i'm not
researching any of these guys sorry there's so many researchers over here I
really can't make any headway on there, but I care about
these names right here and then I would just have to put these
guys in there. I'm actually kind of interested in the Weakly and the
Anderson. So then my genealogical tree would just
be focused on them. So i'm just tailored laser focused on just the
brick walls that i'm working on and the casual
building up the tree. Maybe I really haven't decided
it's kind of hard to make a decision because of
the bigger you make your tree the more data there is and you can easily go down
rabbit holes and not make progress on the research that you're hoping to make
on. Now if you haven't built a surname table
before make sure you find this video handy
and accessible through the links in the descriptions. Now before I
give you a few more things that I would like to see
in the link matching tool in order for me to say yes this is awesome
let me invite you to check out Andy's book Andy is my husband that does most
of the DNA videos here on family history fanatics he has a book
called DNA Q&A real questions from real people about
genetic genealogy and if you haven't picked up a copy of
this yet you're going to enjoy the questions that you probably have
already thought of and the ones you probably don't know you should have
thought of all in one book really easy to read and super fun. So
what would I like to see improved on the DNA match
linking tool for me to be jumping up and down and say this is the best thing
ever one of the things I would like to see is that we have these through lines
and if this is going to be an awesome tool it really needs to feed into the
ThruLines. What I would really like to see is that
if you do this extra linking
that those people should show up on your ThruLines
no matter where they are. So on my tree I should have my brother and he's not
here. I should also have a branch for another
two aunts and they're not there and a cousin and they're not here
because we're all descendants from Samuel Curtis Brown,
but Samuel is not in their trees and for some reason it's not passing
through and picking them up. There's also a son of brain and he's not
showing up but i've done that linking thing that
new tool that they have and it's not
showing up so if that could get fixed then
I would be more excited about the usefulness of the jewel maybe it's
coming maybe I did something wrong i'm not sure,
but the jury's still out on
how excited I would be about that. Another thing I've alluded to
before if this is my brother's tree I would
really like for when I link to him he links to me
and I don't have to do that extra step and that's just because I manage
history. Now you can't automatically improve that in other people's
trees because that could create a nightmare,
but if you're a manager of these trees it would be nice to be
able to make it populate to the other person's tree and create that
back-link super quickly. The other thing someone suggested and I thought this was
really interesting and that was once you make a link you
see how this says close family and this is my brother's DNA match list.
What would be really great is if it changed once we click that
little link that this becomes aunt and then this
becomes aunt and this becomes first cousin
or second cousin depending on where they fall in the tree. So it'd be nice if that
happened and that would be kind of cool the one thing that would make it just
knock it out of the park as I mentioned in this video
is that I want a chromosome browser. Because with a chromosome browser
I can know the quality of the matches that ancestor is
recommending more than just the trees people have
built, because remember a tree is only as good as the people
who created it but a chromosome browser can definitely
validate how you're related. So what do you think? Are you
excited to have these new tools from ancestry? Let me know how you're using
them. If you want to learn more about ancestry
ThruLines check out the videos right there.
If you've seen those videos already then
check out this video that we think you might like.