So you've had your DNA tested, and then you hear about this site called GEDmatch. Now,
how do you get started in GEDmatch? And what is it gonna do for you? Howdy,
I'm Andy with Family History Fanatics, and this is a segment of DNA. Be sure to subscribe to our
Channel and click on that bell if you want to be notified about upcoming episodes. GEDmatch is a
third-party database where you can upload your raw DNA files and be able to use their tools to match
with other people regardless of what company those other people tested from. So let me go through
setting up account and getting your first upload on to GEDmatch. So here we are on the GEDmatch
website www.gedmatch.com, and if you scroll down just below the login, there is the link
for those who are not registered. So we're gonna register a new account. Now for your registration,
you just have to fill in some things. I'm going to fill in my name, and if you want to have an alias,
that's shown. In this case, I'm just gonna put FHF for my alias. Then put in your email
address. You're gonna have to do this twice, and finally, you want to enter in a password.
And then just click on the register button. Now a confirmation code will be sent to you,
and you just need to enter that here in order to complete your registration, and you have got your
account registered. Now the first thing you're going to do is you're going to go through and read
the terms and conditions of the website. After you've read through these and you understand them,
it's going to ask you at the bottom to verify that you understand these and you accept them
in order to use the different parts of their website. So I am going to go here to option 1,
and I am going to click here because I've actually read these terms several times before,
and once you've done that, you are now on the home page. Now, this is the page whenever you log in
that you're going to get to. You only have to go through those terms and conditions one time or
whenever they update them. Now the very top of the page, the GEDmatch programmers actually put some
different bits of information that gets updated periodically that is good to go through and read.
Now, as I scroll down, I can see some different information. So on the left-hand side is going to
be information about the kits that I've uploaded as well as any gedcom files. And in this case, you
can see I haven't uploaded anything. There's also a link that if I want to change anything about my
profile, I can change that information right from here on the right-hand side. There's going to be
some information about the different tools that I can use, but right now, what I want to do is I
want to upload my first kit, and for that, I'm going to go over to the upload your DNA files.
And I can just do the generic upload. Now there are detailed instructions to upload your kit on
to GEDmatch, and you can go over those by clicking on this link here but let me show you what it is
going to be. First off, the name of the donor, in this case, this is me. Now I want to have
an alias on here. I can have an alias on here, and so I'm just going to put my initials. Now
different people put different things you don't have to put an alias I recommend it though for
most people because that way people are going to have to contact you before they find out too much
information about you. You want to know whether the donor is a male or female. Now, if you test
it with one of the companies that reports your haplogroups, you can put this information in here,
but you don't have to. I'm gonna leave it blank because I'm using an Ancestry kit,
and Ancestry doesn't test for those. So the next is the company or the source of your kit. And in
this case, I said Ancestry. And then if it is not one of those kits they have listed there,
you can always put in something in the other field. And I've used this whenever I've created my
own kits from different things for testing or just for research purposes. I've listed it as a - and
then I put some information in there. So that is a clue to me as to where that kit is coming from,
but I'm gonna keep this as Ancestry. Now the next is how your kit is going to be classified. And so
whenever you upload your raw DNA file, you want to select one of these. So first off, is this your
DNA. Now that's what this is for me. So I'm gonna close like that. It's my DNA. Now is this the DNA
of a person that you are a legal art guardian? so, for instance, when I uploaded my children's DNA,
I would have clicked on that is this the DNA of a person who's granting a specific authorization to
upload their DNA to GEDmatch. This is what I have tested different relatives, and I've wanted to use
their DNA on GEDmatch that's where I would click. That is this the DNA of a person known by you to
be deceased. So if you have a deceased person's DNA, you can upload that as well. Now then,
there's some others that may get a little bit confusing to some people. So I'll just go through
those real briefly. This is DNA obtained and authorized by law enforcement to identify the
remains of a deceased individual. And this is for things like the DNA Doh project where there are
unknown persons that they found the body, and the DNA Doh project seeks to actually figure out who
that person is. Next, is the DNA obtained and authorized by law enforcement to identify the
perpetrator of a violent crime? Now, this is just for law enforcement use that, and that's going to
actually put some different restrictions on that kit number as far as who is able to be matched
to that. Now next is an artificial DNA kit if it's intended for research purposes. It may not
be used to identify anybody in the ditch at the match database. I've used this one for some of
the artificial kits that I've done in doing some of the research, and you've seen some videos about
those. This is DNA obtained from an artifact, and this is really something that's new. There
are some companies that they will test envelopes, or they will test hair, or they will test other
objects that may have some DNA, and this is used by those to identify who that may be next is an
anonymized sample for a donor to a large scale population study. This allows certain researchers
at universities and other groups that are doing population studies to upload that DNA but not
necessarily have any identifying information on it so that they can use that for their research
study. Now, if you are part of these and you want to do a massive research study, then make sure
you contact the GEDmatch administrators before you upload. And finally, the last one is none
of the above, which they tell you right away if you click on this box, your DNA is not going to
be uploaded. So hopefully, by going through all those other ones, you've actually identified one
of those that could be what your DNA sample is. So that is where the DNA came from. So the next group
here of question is about the privacy about how you want your DNA to be used. So the first one is
the kit to be shown in match results for all other kits in the database. And what this means is this
means that it allows anyone in the database to see your kit whenever it's matched to it,
and that includes law enforcement kits in their match lists. So that is the opt-in option now if
you don't want the law enforcement kits, and we just talked about those above if you don't want
those to be able to see your match in their match list, then you can click on the opt-out you still
have all the same functionality of everything else on the GEDmatch database it's just that
when somebody is using a law-enforcement kit to do a one-to-many or a one-to-one match, it
will not show your kit. The next is for research kits, and this will not be shown in match results,
but you still have functionality to be able to see what kits match with that. And really, this is a
good idea because what it does is it keeps a lot of clutter out of the database. So, for instance,
I have a lot of research kits. Now, if they were always showing up in other people's results,
then somebody that matched me might end up having 10 or 20 matches that are just me when really they
only need one. And so if you are doing this for research like for instance, if you upload a kit
from Ancestry, a kit from 23andMe, a kit from MyHeritage, and a kit from LivingDNA, you really
only need to have one of those as an opt-in or an opt-out kit all the others can be researched kits,
and you're still gonna get the same benefit from them. And finally is the private. If you don't
want to be able to have that kit used to match with other kits, then select it as private. Maybe
it is something that you are just doing for a short time, and you're not ready to actually make
that kit public. In that case, make it private. Now, these settings can be changed at any time on
that homepage. So if you select one and you decide to change your mind later or if circumstances
change and you need to change it, then feel free to go in and change your kit to what you want.
In this case, I'm just going to opt-in. Now the next part is the choosing your file. You need
to know where on your computer your file is. So you're gonna click on the choose your file, and
then it's going to go through, and you're going to find where that document is, and it's going
to either be a txt file or maybe even a zip file. And then once you've selected that, it should pop
up right there. Now it warns you before you click on the upload button that this process may take
several minutes. I've only seen it take a couple of minutes really to as little as just, you know,
10 or 20 seconds. So let's just go through this, and I'll talk you through what's happening. I
click on upload, and it's going. And it is taking that file from the computer, and it is putting up
to their servers. And it's opening that file, and then it's going to start looking at that data. And
as it's looking at that data, it's going to see what that data matches up with, whether it is
complete, whether it is not the correct file size. It's going to look at a lot of different things,
and then it's going to start the processing of that data. And I can see that my files have been
uploaded now. And you can see is the chromosomes are numbering across. It's looking into each one
of those chromosomes. It's then assigned a kit number. And you can write down this kit number
if you want, but this kit number is going to show up on that home page. The great thing is, is once
you have done this, you are going to be able to use those one-to-one comparisons and some other
utilities really just within a couple of minutes. So that's awesome. Now the rest of the tools,
the one-to-many and probably a lot of the tools that you want to use, is going to take a couple of
days because they got to do some more processing to it. But really, you can be up and running in
just a couple of days. So back on the homepage, we can actually see in my user section that the kit
is now up there. It is still being tokenized based off of this 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 icon they have, and
it said that I could use the one-to-one autosomal DNA comparison within a couple of minutes. So you
don't have to wait very long till you can start using some of the tools, but if you wait a couple
of days, then you'll start to be able to use a lot of these other DNA applications that are on
here. Now, if for any reason you want to delete the kit, or you want to delete your account, let
me just go through and delete this kit, and that will delete the account. So you know how to do
that in order to let the kit go. And click on the little pencil icon, and that is going to give you
the kit profile management. And for this, you can do whatever changes that you want to make to the
information that you put in initially, but you can also go and remove the kit. Now to remove the kit,
you're going to have to pipe your current password and then click on delete. And it says confirmation
of this is going to take some time, and then the kit was deleted. So now, on my home page, I don't
have any kids anymore. Now let's say that you want to delete this profile. In this case, I do want
to leave this profile because this is just a junk profile that I created for this video. I click on
the user management, and it allows me to change whatever I want. So if you do want to change
your alias or if you want to change your email password, that's fine. I'm gonna go over here
to the profile registration deletion. Now you can use this page to delete everything you don't need
to go through and delete things one at a time, but you can delete everything from this page, and
this includes your profile. So once you do this, you're not gonna be able to log in to GEDmatch
anymore. You're gonna have to set up another account. So you're gonna have to enter your
password and then click on the authenticate. Now it's going to give you another warning because,
again, this is the last time to be able to save any of that information that you may have had.
It says remove registration all associated DNA and gedcom resources permanently. Click on that,
and it has deleted your entire account. So when you click on continue, it goes back. And so let
me try to log in with that information again, and I've entered in the email and the password,
and it's as an invalid login that account has been deleted completely. So for those of you who
are just starting in genetic genealogy and want to get involved in GEDmatch,
that's how you set up an account and get your first DNA kit uploaded. Now you can upload as
many DNA kits as you want. Just make sure that you have permission from the owners of those kits
before you upload them. I've been using GEDmatch for about six years now, and it is a wonderful
website. It's got a lot of great tools and has helped me a lot in my DNA research. So if you
have any questions about the GEDmatch website, put it in the comments below, and I'll try to answer
it. And if you like this video be sure to give it a thumbs up and share it with all your friends.