GEDmatch One To Many Report (2023 Guide)

The One To Many Report on GEDmatch is the starting point for researching your DNA matches on the site. This article is a guide to using the reports for your genealogy research.

GEDmatch overhauled the website in 2021. Our examples are from the latest version.

Two Different One To Many Reports

The original One To Many Report was a simple grid with a limited number of columns.

GEDmatch then introduced a more advanced grid display that allows sorting on any column. They also added filters on attributes including the number of centimorgans.

Both versions of the report are available on the free tier.

The paid tier adds some extra functionality to the advanced grid display. This article focuses on what’s available from the free versions.

Let’s start with a breakdown of the basic report. As the same information and more are shown on the larger report, I’ll explain the columns in the later section.

Basic One To Many Report

The basic report shows the least amount of information, but you may find it useful for a quick review.

How to launch the basic report

You launch the basic report by clicking on your Kit Number in the DNA Resources section.

I have several kits on GEDmatch, and all are listed in the center of the Home Page.

The One To Many Report on GEDmatch is the starting point for researching your DNA matches on the site. This article is a guide to using the reports for your genealogy research.

GEDmatch overhauled the website in 2021, and our examples are from the latest version.

If you’re wondering why I have three kits: one is from Ancestry, one is from 23andMe and one is a SuperKit that combines the two. You can read all about GEDmatch superkits here.

Each kit number is a hyperlink that opens the basic report for that kit.

Advantages of the basic report

The basic report gives you two quick and easy ways to launch other reports. This is through the first two columns, which are hyperlinks.

• The Kit number opens the basic one to many report for that kit.
• The column headed “1:1” contains a hyperlink to the autosomal one-to-one report between your kit and this match (we have a separate guide to the GEDmatch one-to-one reports).

The other big advantage is that the limited number of columns will fit on a single screen. This means that you don’t have to scroll horizontally to see all the information.

Drawbacks of the basic report

The main disadvantage is that the report can’t be sorted or filtered.

This means I don’t spend much time with this version.

What’s in the basic report?

Every column in the basic report is also shown in the more advanced report.

So, check out the next section for an explanation of these columns:

• Kit number
• 1:1 report link
• Name
• Email
• Largest segment
• Total cM
• Overlap
• Date Compared
• Testing Company

One To Many Report (Limited Version)

This report first appeared some years ago as a “beta” report. You can still see this label in the Classic version of the website (I cover the Classic website in the final section of this article).

The free and paid tier use the same interface, but some of the features and columns are disabled on the free tier.

How to launch the full report

Launch this report from the Home Page through the “One-To-Many – Limited Version” link under the “Free Tools” section.

Unlike the basic version, you must enter a Kit Number to run this report.

There are a lot of filters at the top of the page, but most are only needed for advanced scenarios. I’ll cover those filters in a later section.

My two favorite filters are “With this limit” and “cM size”.

With this limit filter

The “With this limit” filter sets the number of DNA matches included in the report. If you change nothing else, this is your top N matches ordered by the amount of DNA you share.

The default limit is 50, which is quite low. The free tier has a maximum of three thousand kits.

I like to set the limit to a few thousand.

cM size filter

Some GEDmatch users may have tens of thousands of matches in the database. Others, like myself, have a paltry few thousand.

The more matches people have, the less time they tend to spend with those difficult low cM matches.

If you are dealing with high volumes, then you may want to raise the centimorgans threshold using the cM size filter.

The Most Useful Columns In The One-To-Many Report

When you first look at this report, there seems to be a lot going on with so many filters and columns.

But many of the columns can be largely ignored for most of your genealogy research. I’ll review them in the next section.

Here are the most useful columns for researching your family tree:

Kit

The kit number is also a hyperlink that launches the one-to-many report for that kit.

Name / Alias

Often the most important aspect of the Name/Alias field is whether it helps you identify the DNA match on other test websites.

This is easiest when the match chooses to use their full name. I can immediately spot one of my matches who has DNA on GEDmatch, Ancestry, MyHeritage, and FamilyTreeDNA. He uses the same double-barrelled surname everywhere.

Many of your matches will have a name that starts with an asterisk (*). This means they are using an alias or nickname.

Email

Some of my top DNA matches share the same email address. This means that one person is managing the kits for several other people.

So, be sure to specify the kit number and name when you are sending a message.

GED / Wikitree

GEDmatch lets you upload a family tree to the website via a GEDCOM file. If you haven’t done so yourself, you can check out our tutorial on uploading a tree to GEDmatch.

Users of Wikitree can also hook up their tree to the GEDmatch website. This is less common amongst my own matches.

I often use this column to sort DNA matches so that all matches with a tree are at the top of the report.

Age (days)

This is the length of time that the kit has been on the GEDmatch website.

It’s a useful column when you drop in and out of GEDmatch every few months. Sort on this column to see your DNA matches added within the last sixty days.

Sex

This is Male or Female of course. This column may help when you’re trying to identify a match on Ancestry or another test site.

When you have several matches using the same initials as an alias, the gender information can tip you in the right direction.

Autosomal Total cM

The report is sorted by default by the total number of centimorgans you share with your DNA matches.

You may miss the extra relationship suggestions that other websites give you based on this total. The main test sites usually give you a range of possible relationships such as 2^nd to 3^rd cousin.

If you like this kind of help, I recommend plugging the GEDmatch cM number into the Shared CM tool on the DNA Painter website.

When you’re trying to identify the DNA match on other sites, be aware that the total centimorgans are estimates by each company. The number isn’t going to be exactly the same on different sites.

Largest

You may share DNA with your matches on multiple segments and different chromosomes.

The largest segment shows the number of centimorgans with the highest count across all the segments with shared DNA.

The largest segment and the total cM will be identical for some of your matches. This most likely means that you only have one segment in common. Theoretically, you could share two segments with the same count of cMs on both.

There is another important aspect of the Largest column. The number is a hyperlink that opens the one-to-one report. We have a separate guide to using the One To One reports.

You may wonder why the numbers are suffixed with a “Q”.

Q refers to an algorithm that GEDmatch uses to improve the quality of the match estimates.

Source

This is a vital column when you’re trying to identify the DNA match on another website. It shows the source company of the uploaded DNA kit.

The column may show a clear description of “Ancestry”, “23andMe”, “MyHeritage”, or “FTDNA”. (The last acronym is for Family Tree DNA).

But you will also see some cryptic descriptions like “Migration – F2 – A”. When you see a source description starting with “Migration”, you just need to check the last letter:

• A is for Ancestry
• M is for 23andMe
• H is for MyHeritage
• F is for FamilyTreeDNA

Overlap

I’ve written a full article on what overlap means on GEDmatch. The topic is a little complicated, but you’ll get a full explanation at that link.

I’ll mention here that you don’t need to pay too much attention to overlap for your higher centimorgan matches.

But if you’re digging down into matches with lower cMs, it becomes more important to understand.

Skipping The Specialist Columns

In this section, I’ll point out which sections and columns you can safely ignore until you are getting into some specialist research.

What’s wrong with the “Select” column?

The first column can cause confusion until you realize that it’s disabled in the free tier. I think we’d have a better user experience if the column was simply removed on the free version.

The paid tier enables the option to select specific DNA matches and run further reports.

Ignore the useless Type column

The Type column will contain a “2” for most of your DNA matches but will vary for a few others.

It represents some system information for the GEDmatch system, and you can ignore it completely.

Specialist analysis

I don’t pay much attention to the Haplogroup and X-DNA sections in this report.

However, they will come into play if you want to follow some specialist lines of research. To do so, you’ll need a good understanding of some lesser-known areas of genetics.

I recommend Blaine Bettinger’s book on genetic genealogy, which has dedicated chapters for these areas. You can check out my review of Bettinger’s guide to DNA testing.

But you still may want to know what these columns mean in the one-to-many report. Read on for some background.

Haplogroup section for specialist research

The haplogroup section has two columns. The “mt” heading refers to mitochondrial DNA, while the Y is of course Y-DNA.

If you tested with Ancestry or MyHeritage, you will not have your haplogroups.

23andMe customers are given their mt haplogroup, and male testers get their Y haplogroup in reports on their website. GEDmatch won’t extract this from your uploaded test.

However, you can fill in the details by editing your kit profile to set your known haplogroups. This lets your DNA matches see the information in their reports.

X-DNA section for specialist research

The X-DNA section has two columns: the total cM and the largest segment.

Less than ten of my DNA matches on GEDmatch show shared X-DNA with me.

What does that mean about all my other matches? It doesn’t really tell me much. They can still be close relatives!

If you want to get into some advanced analysis, you can use shared X-DNA to rule out some possible relationships.

Advanced Filters

I’ve covered two filters at the top of the report screen: “With this limit” and “cM size”. These are the ones I use most regularly.

But let’s look at the other filters – working from left to right.

Filter by Autosomal / X

This filter is set to Autosomal by default. You can toggle to show only DNA matches with shared X DNA.

If you’ve uploaded an autosomal DNA test (e.g. from Ancestry), you’ll notice that the filtered report shows you DNA matches with zero shared autosomal centimorgans. That is not unusual.

I mentioned in an earlier section that you may be able to use X-DNA for some specialist analysis.

With this offset

This filter lets you look at a subset of your DNA matches. It can help minimize your scrolling.

The feature is s a bit clumsy, and I’d prefer to be able to set a minimum and maximum cM threshold. But you can use this filter to mimic that kind of request.

For example, I can set “With this offset” to 1000 and the “With this limit” filter to 100.

This starts my matches at the top 1000^th match and shows the next 100 matches.

Tag groups

Tag groups give you a way to color-code DNA matches. They are more useful with the paid tier tools.

Overlap Cutoff

I’ve written a separate article about overlap in the One-To-Many report.

What Does Green Mean On The Report?

Some of the rows in the report may have the Name and Age fields colored in green. The green color highlights the recently added kits to the GEDmatch database.

If you want to see all your most recent matches, you can sort the “Age (days)” column in ascending order.

Drawbacks With The One To Many Report

The GEDmatch interface has some aspects that may make you wonder if you’re doing something wrong!

I’ll describe them here so that you don’t waste time trying to figure out how to change the display to make it more useful.

Unable to hide unwanted columns

If I could hide the useless Type column and the less-than-useful Haplogroup information, then I’d be able to see everything I need without scrolling horizontally.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to hide columns.

Unable to reorder columns

Modern website grid displays let you reorder the columns by dragging them left or right. This is not a feature within the GEDmatch site.

It’s on my wishlist, as it would let me avoid having to scroll across the screen to see the useful columns.

Finding the horizontal scrollbar

The horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the screen has been a longstanding bugbear. It’s necessary because all the columns don’t fit on a single screen.

I was disappointed to see that the latest interface changes don’t make it easier to access the scrollbar. I’d prefer to see it fixed in place so it’s always accessible without endless scrolling.

Using The The Classic View

At the time of writing, GEDmatch lets you log into the older version of the interface.

The older display provides two free versions of the One To Many reports:

• Basic report (classic version)
• Beta report (classic version)

The features and filters are the same as the new display, although the visual interface is a little different.

Shared Matches

GEDmatch refers to shared matches as “People Who Match Both Kits” when you provide two kit numbers to their free tier report.

Check out our guide to using shared matches on GEDmatch in your family research.

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