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.