12 steps to identify your common ancestor, with the Your DNA Family app

Hello and welcome to the YouTube channel of Your DNA Family. This video will show you how you can get more out of your 23andMe DNA test in 12 simple steps and increase your chances to identify the common ancestor from whom you and your DNA cousins inherited this special piece of ancestral DNA. It's also a short introduction to our app, though you can certainly use a lot of the steps also without our app. Ready? Then let's get started. 1. If you do have a family tree, load it via GEDCOM or Anantafel format. Family trees and DNA are your two main sources of information. Surely you can use only one of them, but you won't get very far. We offer three different ways how you can get family tree information into our app. By importing a GEDCOM or Anantafel file, or by manually editing any family tree. Just click on the Family Tree To-Do card and we will guide you through the process.

Number 2. Load your Ancestry Composition predicted ethnicity data. 23andMe offers not only an overview of your predicted ethnicity. They also offer the same granular information for pieces of your inherited DNA. So, in step 2, you can load this information via a simple click on the To-Do card. It will then be displayed for every triangulated group and is an aggregation of every DNA cousin who uploaded his ethnicity data. 3. Load the matching segments you share with close and distant relatives. Like in the previous steps, with a simple click, we are loading your DNA matches into our app. For those that have more than 1000 matching segments, we are starting with the closest matches first, so as not to overwhelm you. Every week, you will get a reminder to check for new matches. Again, all this happens automatically with a simple click. We will then identify which of your matches are at an overlapping position on a chromosome, and neatly sort them into possible triangulation cards for you to explore further.

4. Click on possible triangulation cards until your first triangulated group is built automatically. Not all your matches are your DNA cousins in recent time. But don't worry, we will automatically identify your DNA cousins through triangulation. All you have to do is click the possible triangulation card, and we will execute the comparisons for you on 23andMe website. Think of it like a butler's service. Just one with 8 arms instead of 2. So it will be very fast. 5. Click on the new TG card to see all the information we collected about your common ancestor. After clicking a couple of possible triangulation cards, you should get your first triangulated group. There is no degree in genetics needed. No complicated process of entering centimorgan thresholds like on other websites. Now, you have unlocked the plethora of information when you click on the new TG card. You can find all the information that your DNA cousin, close and more distant relatives of yours, have submitted to 23andMe here in one place.

All of you have inherited an ancestral DNA segment from a common ancestor, and you will mostly work with the various menus here to increase your chances to identify him or her dramatically. 6. Identify hints from automatic surname matches and locations of your ancestors. One of the most powerful hints are surname matches. That means when two or more DNA cousins in a single triangulated group are researching the same surname, the visualization you see here was automatically created. We do believe that what can be done automatically should be done so by our app. This gives you more time to analyze the information and work with your DNA cousins on solving genealogical puzzles. As you can see, this person over here and this person over here share the same surname Davis. That means both of them are researching the surname Davis. Here, we have two people researching the surname Alan. Down here, we have the surname Lathrop. You get the picture.

You can see as well that these three people here on the left side do share a lot of different surnames in common. So, they must be closely related. My recommendation would be to start actually with those three people and extend their family trees. 7. Work on locations for the triangulated group that aren't geo-located yet, so that they are shown on the world map. Locations are important. They provide another set of hints to us in finding out where the common ancestor is probably from. But, they also help us in identifying common locations of our DNA cousins. This helps in identifying most recent common ancestors when their family trees meet. In order to provide all locations that we have collected from your DNA cousins and yourself, we need to geo-locate them first. The process is assigning longitude and latitude to a place. Here, we have a DNA cousin who has the location of Dutsmoth. When you click on it, we will query the FamilySearch server and present all possible places in the world.

It returns with one location, Dutsmoth in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Which certainly looks like the correct one. On the right side, you can see the original information that this DNA cousin has provided, which sometimes gives more hints. For example, counties or states. Once you have identified the geo-locations, we are displaying all locations on the world map. Either as pins for individuals or in circles, when we have summed up several locations. This example is quite interesting, as we do have Cape Verde mentioned for one of the DNA cousins. But we will have also several locations in Europe, in the US and in Canada. 8. Write down all your findings in your first introductory post for this TG. As that will be shown to every DNA cousin who joins. It's very important that we collect information from all hints in one single place per triangulated group. This isn't only for us. But for all DNA cousins now, and in the future, that are also part of this triangulated group.

For this reason, we should write an introductory post like in this example about a common ancestor of mine that is actually identified. I've listed the locations the ancestor is from, together with Wikipedia links so that others can look up where these locations are exactly. I have also added a section about the most recent common ancestor that we have identified so far. This is a couple that was born around 1670 in this small German town. Lastly, as additional information, I added a link to an article highlighting that one of the descendants founded the city of Johnsburg in McHenry County in the US. You can always edit this sticky note as you find out more about the common ancestor via the edit button here. This is the number of national documents that we can use in this report. This is the number of national documents that we can use in this report. This is the number of national documents that we can use in this report.

This is the number of national documents that we can use in this report. This is the number of national documents that we can use in this report. This is the number of national documents that we can use in this report. This is the number of national documents that we can use in this report. This is the number of national documents that we can use in this report. This is the number of national documents that we can use in this report. This is the number of national documents that we can use in this report. This is the number of national documents that we can use in this report. This is the number of national documents that we can use in this report. your family's trees intersect. It's very important that we reach out to every DNA cousin and ask them for information that they are willing to share with us. Ask them for their grandparents' name, locations and dates for births, marriage and death. Focusing on the grandparents or great grandparents usually brings us back to the 1940 census in the US and also far enough back to not violate data privacy laws of living people. Here on the left side, you see a list of all DNA cousins within one of my triangulated groups and the names are blurred out due to data privacy concerns.

Once you select one cousin, all the information given by the cousin is displayed automatically. Again, no need to enter this. It's all automatically stored in your data. Here we can see the maternal haplogroup only as it is a female and that there is at least three of the four grandparents were born in the US and also that the person is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.

10. Invite those that respond as guests to work together with them on identifying how all of you are related. For those people that reply to your message on the 23andMe messaging system, you should go ahead and invite them via a guest account, which is for free for our app. Guests can only see the triangulated groups they are invited for and are limited to working with you and the other DNA cousins on how you are all related to each other. The invitation is done very easily. You click on cousins and then select one of the cousins that you want to invite and then click on this orange button, send invitation over here. This is only one thing to keep in mind. As a requirement, you need to write an introduction post first as we are displaying this post as part of the onboarding to your invited DNA cousin. This will hopefully increase the chances that they do see value in joining and working with you. 11. Extend your DNA cousin's family tree upwards and use surname and location hints to find most recent common ancestors.

As we mentioned earlier, it's very important to connect family trees, not only yours, but also that of your DNA cousins in the triangulated group. One way to do this is to extend the family trees of your DNA cousins upwards, further back in time. You can use the information they have given to you and also use surname hints as well as locations in the world map. That's why it's so important, as mentioned in step 9, to reach out to them and ask if they or someone in their family has already researched a family tree, no matter how short it is. 12. Extend your family tree downwards to find descendants and eventually connect with your DNA cousins. This is basically going into the reverse direction from our previous step. You should also research the descendants of your ancestors, so that you can hopefully get into a time period where you can then match those descendants to your DNA cousins in the triangulated group. Obituary information is usually a good resource, as it not only lists the death dates but also all children and sometimes grandchildren as well.

So, these were the 12 steps to identify your common ancestor or at least maximize your chances, as it's not always easy to identify them. But our hobby DNA genealogy is a lot more fun when we can work together with others, and our app was specifically written with that in mind. I hope you found this video informative and helpful. Please don't forget to subscribe to our channel and give us a like if you like to see more videos about our app. And please leave your comments or questions in the section below. Thank you. Thank you.