Many people want to separate out their DNA matches into their paternal side and their maternal side.
And you have to have had your mother or father or both of them tested to be able to do this.
Now, 23andme and FamilyTreeDNA did this once you identified who your mother and father
are. Ancestry just added this feature. And so today, I want to go through how
you can filter based on your mother or your father. Howdy, welcome to Family History Fanatics,
where we love helping you climb your family tree and have fun along the way. Before we continue,
if you want to help support our work, there's many ways you can do it. That
there are links in the description below to our website to show notes and free guides,
but the most important thing is to leave a comment and share this videos with others. We continue to
grow thanks to people like you. If we go and we look at our match list, I have had my mother,
and my father tested on ancestry. And you can see here that if we pull up any one of these matches,
it's going to tell me that this is on either my mother's side or my father's side.
I haven't done anything else to be able to do this other than the fact that my mother and my father
have tested. So ancestry has already identified all these people and how they fit onto my family
tree on which side. As I look down at the full list, these are all interspersed. So here,
looking at the pink is all the people that are on my father's side or on my mother's side,
and all the blue are the ones on my father's side. So if you have your mother or your father
or both of them tested and those results uploaded to ancestry, you should be seeing this same thing.
What about, though, if you don't have your mother or your father tested. Can you still
get some of this advantage? And the answer there is yes. So here is my wife's. Now her
parents had already passed away before there was the commercial genetic testing available. And so,
she doesn't have her mother or father tested on ancestry. As you're looking at your match list,
one of the things that you'll see here is there will be a question. Do you recognize them?
Is this somebody that you know? If you click yes on this, it's going to pull up which side of the
family. Is this on your mother's side? Is it on your father's side? Or is this on both sides of
your family? So, in this case, if I know this person. I know the relationship. I can select
which side of the family it is on. It's then going to ask us what relationship. And it gives us the
most common relationships first. So with this person here, you can see there's first cousin,
great grandmother, great-granddaughter, or a grandaunt. If those are not the relationship, you
can always click on the show more possibilities. These relationships are ordered by the most likely
down to the least likely. So as I click on that. I can see that, hey there's a lot more
relationships. Half aunt, half-niece, grandmother, granddaughter, half-sister, aunt, or niece.
And in this case, this is a half aunt. I click on that, and it's going to have me confirm
this information. So you've indicated that this person is on your is your half aunt on your
mother's side. Once I confirm it, you can see that mother side now shows up in that person's
information. If you don't have your mother or your father tested, you can still start to divide out
your matches into your mother's side and your father's side based on those ones that you know.
This may make it easier when you're looking at a shared match list of a new match. Are you seeing
just mother's side? Are you seeing just father's side? Are you seeing both? That might help you
to isolate where you need to focus your search in order to put them further into your family tree.
Now, as ancestry continues to add features, we will go over those features and show you
how to use them, but this is a great easy feature to help separate out your matches
just into the two sides of your family. If you still have questions about DNA,
then consider joining us for our live streams, where we answer your DNA questions. Or become an
FHFExtra member where we have even more training and live streams to answer your questions.
And one of the things you might have seen on there is the colored dots which are also a way
to group your different matches. If you'd like to learn how Devon groups them, then watch this
video up here. But if you want to learn something else about DNA, then watch this video down below.