Because honestly. How many times has this (or some version of it) happened to you?
Okay, today's the day I'm finally going to fill in this blank on my family tree. Let me pull up those cousin matches I found last week that I want to look at again. Shoot. Can't find them. What was that surname they had I thought looked familiar? I think I have it in my tree. Let me open that, too. Was it in this census record? OH! This neighbor's surname looks familiar! I saw that on one of my cousin matches' pages!
But that was 20 minutes ago, and I have no idea which one it was.
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| I'm over it just thinking about it. |
Bouncing back and forth between our trees and our cousin match pages is part of this process of solving family mysteries with DNA. But keeping track of all the moving pieces becomes really hard, especially as we're managing lists for multiple relatives who have tested. So how can we do this more efficiently? How can we make the seams between our cousin matches and our trees disappear? That was my question as I added 23 and Me as the final player in my testing lineup. And I believe I've found the solution I was looking for.
I'm going to gear these suggestions towards Ancestry/AncestryDNA and their tree building platform, but much of what I'm about to share will work on others too. I checked MyHeritage, and they have similar functionality in their tree builder. Many other tree building websites, apps, and hordes of desktop software will as well. But to achieve the full end result I'm going to discuss in my approach, you'll want to use a web-based option, for reasons that will become clear later on.
Using the Notes Section
In an Ancestry tree, every person has a personal landing page. From that page, you can access all kinds of tools that Ancestry has tucked away. One of those tools is the Notes feature. To use them, you first need to activate the hidden toolbar so you can see them.
Notes are private places to leave plain text information for each person in your tree. Some people use them for research logs. Others use them to record private information that needs to be remembered, but not broadcast to the rest of the world. I've seen others use them to transcribe and annotate all the sources they've attached to the person. (If you're already using them for one of these purposes, sit tight. I have an alternative solution for you that I'll cover in a bit.)
For most people, however, opening the Notes section is going to give you a blank slate.
If you've followed me for any length of time, you know I advocate for having a separate tree strictly for tracing biological relationships. Every time you find and confirm a DNA match, it's wise to add that information to this tree. For each confirmed match you have on your DNA match list, ideally there would be a corresponding person in your biological tree.
And it eliminates a lot of confusion when your biological tree is the one linked to your DNA match results.
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| Stop! Attaching! Your DNA! to Trees! that Don't! Belong! to You! |
So you've been working through your cousin match list, and you've found some relatives that you recognize. Maybe even some others that are more distantly related. You want to keep track of this information because it won't be long until there's too much information to remember. So let's make things easier and tie knots at both ends, as it were.
Open the DNA match page for the person in the AncestryDNA interface. In this example, I'm using the entry for one of my close relatives.
I copy the link from their tree page and paste it into the Notes section of their AncestryDNA page.
Then I copy the link from their AncestryDNA page and paste it into the Notes section on my tree.
No more hunting to get back to a match I can't find on AncestryDNA. No more wondering if the person in my tree is the same one from my DNA match list or not. I'm still in the process of setting this up, and I've already come across so many lines in my tree that are missing. And since every testing service (except Family Tree DNA) creates unique URLs for each of their cousin match results, you can add testing data from MyHeritage DNA and 23 and Me to your notes in a similar fashion.
Bonus Tip: Link from the Ancestry Profile page instead of the AncestryDNA match result
Another option for creating these links from AncestryDNA is to click on the person's name to go to their Ancestry Profile page instead. Well, most of the time you'll click on the person's name—unless they have a "managed by" link instead.
Clicking on whichever one they have will take you to the Ancestry Profile page of the person who either took the test, or the one who administers it. If you'd rather use this page, copy the URL from this page and paste it into your tree instead.
This is an especially useful thing to do if you manage multiple tests, or the person you're linking to does, as is the case on both sides with this particular relative. On this page, I can see all the tests she administers and compare them to each of the tests I manage. Since I manage four kits of my own at this point, this saves me a lot of time. And in the event that my relatives take or administer more tests, I'll be able to see that any time I click this link. If I linked to the individual match result, I'd lose out on a lot of that additional functionality.
Using Web Links
If you're already using your Notes section for something else, you have another option. If you scroll down to the Web Links section of the person's tree page, you can enter the URL link for the match there instead. Label it "AncestryDNA" rather than something like "DNA test" to distinguish it from others you might add in the future from other sites.
And before you panic and think putting these URLs in your tree means anyone could see or use them, that is not the case. You must be logged into the respective accounts from each testing company for the URLs to open the match pages. The links are there purely for your own personal use and reference. Even if someone with full access to your tree clicked on these links, they'd be prompted to login before the sites will display the match.
A Greater Purpose
What I like about this approach is how it serves a two-fold purpose. Yes, it enables me to be as lazy as possible by making it easier for me to click on less things to get to where I want to be. It also provides the ability to solve another problem that really doesn't have any easy solutions.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about these DNA connections I work with, and how to give them permanence. I don't feel like our community has reconciled the absolute expectation on us to honor the privacy of DNA testers with the need to document the discoveries we're making because of them. We need the ability to record what we're learning, and to discuss the evidence we've used openly. For years, I've struggled to know how to do this without causing a maelstrom of personal attacks from others about being "careless" with other people's "private information."
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| Me to the people in comments. And on Twitter. And in my email. And on the internet in general. |
But where did this illusion come from that anyone taking a DNA test gets to maintain ANY kind of privacy? Who lied to you? And do you realize how badly you've been lied to?
The fundamental transaction behind DNA testing is completely incongruent with privacy. In agreeing to take a DNA test, we trade away our right to privacy in exchange for knowledge. We can't have any illusions about that. There's no other way to interpret what we're after, and what we're giving up to obtain it. And if the people we're inviting to test have any other understanding about this transaction, we've promised them something that DNA testing is going to prevent us from delivering.
I don't have a perfect solution for how to reconcile privacy with documenting and discussing DNA as evidence. But creating a paper trail in our trees for these connections is a start, even if we're the only ones who can see them. Hopefully the act of writing down our findings will take away some of the stigma surrounding this issue, so we can all prepare ourselves to openly admit there is no other solution.