Saturday, September 17, 2016

Working on DNA matches in Genome Mate Pro

For this entire day I have been working on my DNA matches. This is an amazingly long process that I have been working on for years.

I have personally DNA tested at 23andMe and AncestryDNA and transferred my data to FTDNA and Gedmatch.

I am using a program called Genome Mate Pro (GMP) to help me work with my matches.  This is a great program, but it has been a long day of learning for me, although I already knew most of how to use GMP. 

In GMP so far I have 21 Profiles. I have all 20 kits of people I have tested at 23andMe and also 1 from an uncle who tested on his own account.

I normally use 529andYou extensively to run comparisons but at the moment 23andMe is not working for me, due to the insanely high number of shares I have on my one account.  (5000+, so unless you are crazy like me, you needn't worry about this happening to you)

I have a ton of data, what I need now is a plan of how to manage it.  GMP is a big part of that plan.  I also need to plan in what order I will try to work on matches.  I will confess that right now I am often working according to who emailed last ;)

I think what I will do is work in this order: the top matches at each site the sites being:

1 -23andme
2- FTDNA
3- AncestryDNA
4- Gedmatch
5- Geni
6- MyHeritage

I will do all 6 sites for one person, then move onto the next person for all 6 sites.  

The first people will be:

1 - Me
2 - My father
3 - Brandon
4 - Tiffany
5 - Sandra
6 - My paternal grandmother 
7 - My maternal grandfather
8 - my children's father
9 - my oldest daughter
10- my 2nd oldest daughter 

So following this plan, first up is my top 23andMe match, then my top FTDNA match and so on. This isn't a perfect plan, because new matches may come in that are higher than the ones I have already done, but every possible plan has some potential drawback.

My hope is that by working through the matches in this fashion, updating GMP with the segment data, by the time I get to the smaller matches I will already have a good idea as to which ancestor likely contributed that DNA.

One issue I am having is the time to just keep the database updated.  I need a schedule of when I update what.

To prepare to start this adventure, I started to import files to my GMP profile.  I have filled in all the profile parts, with my Gedmatch #, 23andMe name etc.  Importing the data for gedmatch was quite the challenge.  Do not do what I did.  I did a one-to-many compare, and got the list of 2000 matches.  I did the first import of the 2000 matches.  I then manually clicked every freaking box (yes, thats right, 2000 boxes) and then was unable to do the 2D chromosome browser which is what GMP needed to add the segment data for the 2000 matches.  I would have had to click the boxes again, 250 or so at a time perhaps.  This was not a good plan, so I went to the GMP user group on Facebook and asked for help.  A kind person there suggested I use the Tier 1 features at gedmatch instead.  For $10/mth you can get access to the Tier 1 features at gedmatch.  Instead of using the other method you can then use the Tier 1 features of segment matches and triangulation to import to GMP.  There were over 4000 kits in the segment match list, and no boxes to check.  I repeat, no boxes to check!  That alone was worth the $10. I did have to import it twice to GMP tho, once for GMP to make the relatives list and once for the segment data. 

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