On this channel, we've talked a lot about matches on Ancestry,
and MyHeritage, 23andMe, and even Family Tree DNA and
GEDMatch. One thing that we have not talked a lot about is
matches on Living DNA. And that is because Living DNA was a
newer company. It took them a while to get their matches
going. And I'm going to show you today what you can do with the
matches that you have at Living DNA. Before I get into the
nitty-gritty, I want to emphasize that Living DNA is a
work in progress. They're one of the smallest companies.
They're one of the newest companies. And they are slowly
bringing tools online as you can see from the website. In
some of my past videos about Living DNA, you saw where I
only had one or two matches. And now, I actually have a few
hundred matches as you will see. On Living DNA, you have
your opening profile. And where we want to go is to this link
that says, Relatives. That is going to be our match list. So,
the match list looks very similar to other match lists. As
you can see on here, they tell you how much shared DNA with an
estimate of what the relationship is. Nice thing is
they give you both the percentage as well as the total
centimorgans. One thing I like is they tell you whether or not
this person is active. In other words, have they been on the
platform in a while? So, you can see that some of these
people are less active, as well as some that are active. It lets
you know if there are shared matches between them. Now,
since I only have, I think about 440 matches total on
Living DNA. Most of my matches don't have a lot of shared
matches. Clicking on this little arrow is going to get
you to the profile page. So, here on the profile page, we
can see the same information. There's a few other things then
that you can do. One, is you can have a conversation. Basically,
this is their messaging system between different people.
Unfortunately, you don't have their email address that you
can email them directly. But in the messaging system, you can
always go and ask them for their email address if you
want to do it off the platform or you can do it on the
platform if you want to keep everything there. There are
some things that are not active yet. For instance, you can see
here this shared DNA. That would be like a chromosome
browser. That says it's coming soon. It's not available yet.
The tree builder. This is building an actual tree on
Living DNA and that is still in process. So, that isn't working
yet. But down at the bottom, if we scroll, we can see here are
our shared matches and how much DNA that we share together with
them. One thing I will say is because of the very limited
number of shared matches, you're probably not going to be
able to do a whole lot as far as clustering with these.
Because it's just simply not enough information. For
instance, if you look at my top match, I share 173 centimorgans
with her. And my next closest match, I only share 56
centimorgans. And it goes down from there. Pretty soon I'm into
the point where I'm only sharing 20 or 30 centimorgans
within really my top 10 matches on the profile page. One thing
that they have is the Relationship. And this is where
it shows the relationship that you might have with them. And
you'll see that this looks very similar to some other things,
for instance, the Shared cM tool in DNA painter. But this
is just a consanguinity chart. Living DNA uses the degree of
relationship. So here it's a fifth-degree relationship
shares an average of 3.25%
You may be wondering okay what is a degree of relationship? And that
is really just a fancy way of saying, "how many divisions they
have had?" For instance the first sharing of DNA is going
to be 50% and that's with parent and child. Then you get
to 25%. Then you get to 12.5%, then 6.5%, and then 3.25:
3.125, 6.25% 3.125%.
So you can see 5 degrees of separation, which is 3.125%. And it
highlights which of the potential people that could be.
Now some of these you can eliminate right off the bat.
For instance, if I'm looking at myself, it couldn't be a
half-great aunt or uncle. Because that would be three generations
back and they're half-sibling. Which while I do have my
grandparents DNA tested. My great-grandparents have been
deceased for at least 20, 25 years at this point. And so even
with as young as I am, there's no way that I can match somebody
living that is that far back. However, these other ones are
all viable options to be able to research. So, you can
probably see that there is a limited amount of information
that you're going to be able to get about your matches on
Living DNA. There is no place that I could find where you
could actually download that whole match list to be able to
use it elsewhere. Although with as few matches as they are, it
wouldn't be that hard to go through and you know, copy that
information with spreadsheet in and afternoon. However, as
Living DNA continues to grow and add people to their
database, I expect to see more tools that could be used with
DNA. Like I said, they have a couple of things there with the
tree builder that is going to be coming out sometime and it
looks like they're going to have a chromosome browser at
least in the works that at some point will be useful. Once
those tools come online, then you're going to be able to
start comparing some of the matches information from Living
DNA with some of your matches on other websites. Now, if you
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