How To Add A Half Sibling To Your Ancestry Tree

A half-sibling relationship cannot be added to an Ancestry tree without first creating their common parent. Sometimes you have the details of the siblings but don’t know anything about their parents. You may also encounter scenarios where two siblings have been incorrectly assigned both parents in your Ancestry tree – and you want to fix … Read more

How To Add Step Parents And Adopted Parents To Your Ancestry Tree

The default relationships in an Ancestry tree are biological father, mother, brother,  and sister. But families are more complicated than that! You can add step-parents, foster parents, and adoptive parents to your Ancestry tree. There are also some other less common relationships available. It’s not obvious how to do this, so we’ll give you a … Read more

How To Add An Unrelated Person To Your Ancestry Tree

It would be nice to have a one-click process to add an unrelated person to your Ancestry tree. Unfortunately, the steps are a little convoluted. One way is to add a “fake” relative to any person, and then remove the connection. This article starts with a step-by-step illustrated walkthrough. We’ll touch on another couple of … Read more

When Will RootsMagic 8 Be Available?

When will RootsMagic 8 be available? You may get irritated responses if you pose this question in several genealogy forums. I spotted one old hand complaining that the question had popped up three times in 45 minutes. I purchased RootsMagic 7 in 2020. The company included a free license key for RootsMagic 8 with this … Read more

GEDmatch Superkits – How To Reap The Benefits

GEDmatch Superkits are part of the paid tier on the GEDmatch website. You can combine up to four uploaded kits in your account into one GEDmatch Superkit – all representing DNA of one person. A GEDmatch Superkit won’t give you a sudden increase in DNA matches. You’re more likely to lose some distant matches at … Read more

GEDmatch Kit Numbers Explained

When you upload your raw DNA results to GEDmatch, you’ll get a unique Kit Number. You’ll be constantly copying or keying it into the GEDmatch comparison reports. Other people may send you their GEDmatch Kit Numbers or ask for yours for collaborating on genealogy research. GEDmatch has changed the format of Kit Numbers several times … Read more

What Is Overlap On GEDmatch – An Illustrated Guide

If you’ve noticed the Overlap column in the One-To-Many Report on GEDmatch, it’s probably because you have DNA matches with varying shades of pink. GEDmatch is warning you to treat these matches with some caution. In general, you don’t need to worry about overlap with your higher (closer) matches. The overlap value is more important … Read more

Is GEDmatch Accurate and Legit?

If you’ve uploaded your DNA to GEDmatch, you may be scratching your head and wondering if your GEDmatch results are accurate. You are bound to see some differences from what your DNA testing company tells you. Both the ethnicity estimates and DNA relative matching will diverge. So, is GEDmatch accurate and legit? Comparing Relationship Estimates … Read more

How To Make Your Online Family Tree Photos Private Or Protected

Are you looking for ways to make your family tree photos private or protected from misuse? There are many advantages to having a public family tree enriched with photos, but there are two major downsides: Your uploaded images may be copied without due credit Your photos may get assigned by mistake to the wrong people … Read more