Wednesday 10 August 2016

Info on Timber

No, I've not joined the logging industry, I'd rather climb the trees :)

For those of you still struggling to understand why GEDMatch shows you some large ancestry matches that you then cannot find in your match list at Ancestry, have you heard about their timber algorithm?

Debbie Kennett posted on the DNA Newbies list a link to a blog post about it by an Ancestry employee so I thought it timely to mention it here.

What is actually most interesting about it are all the comments along the lines of stop making decisions on our behalf and give us our data, warts and all, AND a chromosome browser so that we can make up our own minds.

The usual advice holds, if you are interested in your autosomal DNA results, make the most of your investment, regardless of company, and upload the appropriate file to GEDMatch - full instructions available there once you've registered and clicked the appropriate file upload link.
This cartoon explains why you should, particularly if you tested on Ancestry.
Even if you aren't that interested in your matches, think of those of us that are.
In my experience (I've heaps of kits there), you wont be swamped by enquiries if you are worried about lack of time to respond.

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