INTRODUCTION Do you feel a little overwhelmed when looking at your Ancestry DNA matches? I find that the best way to tackle thousands of matches is to download them into a spreadsheet and organize them in a way that every piece of information can be seen and filtered. The power of spreadsheets allows me to … Read more

dataminingdna.com is now fully secure! I purchased an SSL certificate from my hosting provider, and used the WordPress plugin “Really Simple SSL” to install it on this website. The free plugin provided a painless process for the setup. If I ever need the additional features of the premium product, I’ll happily stick with this company.

Here’s a tip on avoiding a particular display issue with Ancestry when using Chrome. The problem of the spinning wheel started occurring for me in October. The little wheel kept spinning, and the page of match lists would not scroll and display properly. I followed the usual Ancestry instructions to clear down cache to no … Read more

As of late October 2018, Ancestry have released another new display feature on the Match List page: a row below each match displays the number of shared centimorgans and segments. This should be a real time saver when reviewing matches by scanning the page. In combination with the other new feature I posted about, the “no … Read more

Ancestry added a very useful new feature to the main list of matches at some time in September/October 2018. I’m being vague on the timeline because not all Ancestry users get the same new features at the same time. We now see a new tree description toward the right hand side of the page: “Unlinked … Read more

Up to now, I hadn’t paid much attention to Ancestry match gender. This post is a deep dive into how it breaks down. When I first took a snapshot of my Ancestry match data, I didn’t bother taking every piece of information available. For example, I didn’t think that the kit administrator info was useful … Read more

I conducted a review in May 2018 of all my DNA matches on Ancestry and recorded whether the match had a public or private tree, and whether a tree was linked to their DNA. I ran the same review three months later in August 2018, having seen an additional 15 hundred matches added during that … Read more

This post follows on from my May 2018 analysis of the rate of growth of my DNA matches on Ancestry between July 2017 and May 2018. I took another snapshot of all my DNA matches in August 2018. I’m interested in capturing: THE RATE OF GROWTH OF MATCHES THE DISTRIBUTION OF MATCHES BY SHARED CM … Read more

For some of the posts on this blog I’ll be using one way to measure the similarity of two sample sets of data. The statistic is called the Jaccard Index, or the Jaccard Similarity Coefficient. This post is a technical explanation of the calculation itself. The sets of data are the unique ancestral surnames of … Read more

Something I find mildly disappointing with a new DNA match on Ancestry is when I realize that I’ve seen their tree before. The exact same identical tree. I’ll recognize this is the case if I’ve spent some considerable time studying the tree in a previous encounter from an earlier DNA match. What’s happening is that … Read more