Friday, July 8, 2016

New FTDNA Family Matching

FTDNA recently announced they have a new Family Matching tool.

At first look, I have 1448 matches at FTDNA.  180 Maternal and 394 Paternal. A few things I noticed: My maternal half sister Sandra does not have a tree.  My first cousin once removed Samuel does not have a tree.  My maternal grandfather and his sister do not have trees.  I think this may be hindering FTDNA's ability to assign matches as Maternal.  

On a side note, I updated my contact info which was out of date.  If I ever get a close match and for some reason do not notice I would certainly want FTDNA to be able to contact me!

I linked Sandra, and added and linked Tiffany and Samuel.

Working with the Family Trees is not ideal.  I was unable to delete a person I accidentally added twice.  The tool bar at the top is in the way of where I figure the confirm I wish to delete button is.

From the FTDNA description it is clear that the Maternal/Paternal tabs are only activated when you have linked to a maternal or paternal matches in your FTDNA Family Tree.  This is likely true, but the description makes it sound like the tabs will be immediately available which does not seem to be the case. After linking 2 half siblings and a 1st cousin once removed and waiting 24 hrs nothing had changed.

The question here is how is FTDNA determining whether a match is maternal or paternal? It is not a straight-forward in common with for a tested parent.  It is not strictly based on if/where they are linked into your tree either.  They have apparently devised their own system of how to assign matches as paternal or maternal based on matching on the same segment for a segment over a certain size.

The FTDNA website has more info on the new tool here.

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