If you’re not using genetic networks to evaluate your autosomal DNA matches, then you’re missing opportunities to efficiently mine your matches for ancestral clues. Reviewing your DNA matches can be overwhelming, and it can quickly become daunting to use them to confidently build out your family tree. But it doesn’t have to be this way … Read more
Getting your Big Y-700 DNA results from FamilyTreeDNA can be exciting, but it can also create anxiety. I’ve been there, too, and it doesn’t have to be intimidating. Y-DNA, which is passed down from father to son, is just as helpful or perhaps more helpful than autosomal DNA in answering your genealogical research questions. I … Read more
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming pervasive in nearly every industry, and genealogy is no exception. As genealogists, we wish to understand how to incorporate AI models, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, into our genealogy work. But, before we do, what can we learn from other industries that are already using it? As a marketing … Read more
Just a few days ago, Ancestry launched Enhanced Shared Matches as part of their Pro Tools. Ancestry.com customers need to pay $10 per month for Pro Tools in addition to their regular subscription rate. In this post, I answer the question, “is it worth the extra cost?” Enhanced Shared Matches provides additional information about the … Read more
Our ancestors left us clues in the documents they created to help us with our genealogical research. You just need to follow the “genealogical breadcrumbs” to discover that next elusive generation. However, sometimes the path they left is not so clear, and we can be deceived into jumping down rabbit holes of distracting, irrelevant, but … Read more
Tax records have three distinct advantages compared with pre-1850 U.S. census records. Many tax records: Are produced annually; Predate the 1790 census; and Possess more than a list of names. Tax records are often sidelined in our genealogy research because censuses are more widely available and have been popularized because of their availability. Compared to … Read more
I recently stumbled across a 2022 FamilyTreeDNA blog post offering suggestions to improve your Y-DNA age estimates for the time to most recent common ancestor (TMRCA). I was intrigued and decided to give the recommendations a try. Some of their suggestions produced a more immediate change, while others were a bit more difficult to discern … Read more
Last week at Rootstech, FamilySearch announced a new experimental feature to search several unindexed collections. This enhancement harnesses artificial intelligence (AI) and optical character recognition (OCR) to quickly search several valuable record collections. It has the potential to not only drastically cut search time, but it may also help break through brick walls. Full-text Search … Read more
Have you received your Y-DNA test results but don’t feel like you learned as much as you thought you would? This is how I felt, too, until I immersed myself into the scientific details of FamilyTreeDNA’s Big Y-DNA test and designed an “experiment” to refine my test results. The experiment is replicable and can help … Read more
For genetic genealogists, the promise of new DNA matches is both exciting and a necessary component of our research strategy. However, a recent demographic study finds that the number of living kin for the average person will reduce by 38% in the future suggesting we may have fewer DNA matches. The demographic shifts are not … Read more