This was supposed to be a product review of the Ancestry Match Downloader chrome extension. Unfortunately it’s not downloading matches currently. Judging by the reviews and support comments, it stopped working sometime in January 2020. “worked fine on first try about 3 weeks ago but now no longer functions. Wont scan or anything.” Jan 2020 … Read more Ancestry Match Downloader status on 21 Feb 2020

This was supposed to be a product review of using the AncestryDNA Helper chrome extension to download matches. It’s turned into a bit of a detective hunt instead. The big reveal: the extension has been discontinued by the developer. Read on for more… It’s still on the Chrome Store At time of writing, the Ancestry … Read more Whatever happened to the AncestryDNA Helper?

The DNA Match Manager from Heirloom Software is a free desktop application that downloads your matches to file from the major DNA test services. This review is exclusively on downloads from the Ancestry website. Summary It’s fast. It’s free. It leaves a lot of info behind (this may be fine for your needs). Wow, it’s … Read more DNA Match Manager from Heirloom – Product Review

We’ve added a new feature to our DNA Match Graph application: making it easy to see the tree size of individual matches. This post is a quick peek at what it gives you. If you want more background into displaying your matches as network graphs, this post is an introduction. First things first: the Match … Read more Showing Tree Size in a Dna Match Graph

Ancestry shared matches are those that you have in common with another match. This is sometimes referred to as ICW, an abbreviation of “In Common With”. Users of AncestryDNA can see shared matches by clicking on a particular Dna Match and looking at the Shared tab. It’s important to know that the list on the … Read more Ancestry Shared Matches

In July 2018 I posted detailed instructions on how to count Ancestry Matches. This was after an update to the Ancestry website had “taken away” a simple display count at the top of the match list page. That old post is now invalid. Ancestry has recently rolled out a few new filters at the top … Read more How to count Ancestry Matches

As you scroll down the Ancestry Match List page, you’ll eventually see a “Distant Cousin” marker. This is the Ancestry Distant Cousin Threshold. Matches above the mark are what Ancestry calls 4th-6th cousins (and closer). Matches below the mark are what they consider to be “Distant Cousins”. The Ancestry Distant Cousin threshold is 20 centimorgans. … Read more Ancestry Distant Cousin Threshold

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 Tracking Ancestry DNA matches by Spreadsheet