Help:DNA Matches

Categories: DNA Help

The biggest benefit of DNA testing for many of us is the opportunity to connect and communicate with distant cousins who have inherited some of the same DNA from the same ancestors.

Contact Your Matches

An autosomal DNA test from any of the big testing companies (Family Tree DNA, AncestryDNA, 23andMe, MyHeritageDNA) is likely to give you hundreds or even thousands of matches. This is exciting.

However, communicating and figuring out your exact relationship will not be easy! Many of them may not reply to you. It may not be easy for them to share their tree with you.

You can make it easy on them by proactively sharing your WikiTree family tree.

As a WikiTree member you are already sharing your tree. And it's already privacy-controlled. Anyone on the Internet can see trees and profiles on WikiTree, but what they see depends on each individual profile's Privacy Level and Trusted List.

In particular, our Compact Family Tree is optimized for sharing with DNA test matches. This tree view shows eight generations — approximately what is relevant for autosomal test matches — and it displays the maximum number of names and locations in the smallest space for easy scanning.

Click here for handy copy-and-paste templates of messages to send to your DNA matches.

If you know that a match is on your father's side or mother's side, you may want to share your father's or mother's tree instead of your own. Click to your parent's profile, then select "Compact Tree" from the pull-down menu that starts with their ID.

For Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA test matches you can share your direct paternal and maternal lines from your DNA Ancestors page.

Link to Your Tree

Most of the DNA testing companies have a place where you can add a link from your profile to your tree on WikiTree.

Click here to get the URL for your tree.

• 23andMe: Click on the drop-down menu under your name on the right corner of the page and select "Settings". Under the "Personal Information" section, click on the Edit enhanced profile link. Click on "Share a link to your online family tree". Enter the URL for your WikiTree tree.

• AncestryDNA: Click on the drop-down menu under your name on the right corner of the page and select "Your Profile". In the column on the left side of the page, click the blue "Edit" button. Click "Contact", and in the "Websites" field you can add a link to your tree on WikiTree.

• Family Tree DNA: Go to the drop-down menu under your name in the top right corner. Choose "Account Settings". Scroll down to the "My Personal Story" section where you can put in a link to your tree on WikiTree.

• MyHeritageDNA: Add a link to your WikiTree tree in the Welcome part of your family site by logging in and choosing "My Profile" from the drop down menu under your name. Along the left side of the page is a link to "edit preferences". Click that. Along the middle of that page are links. Click on "Home Page". It should bring up an edit box. You can remove the text they have pre-populated there and put in your own welcome, including a link to your WikiTree tree. Save your changes.

Some members also create an image with their WikiTree ID and use that as their profile photo on the testing site. You can use something as simple as Microsoft Paint and put text in the image like "Find me on WikiTree.com: Whitten-1" or "Whitten-1 on WikiTree.com". Save it as a .jpg or .png.

Collaborate with Your Matches

WikiTree is all about collaboration. Since 2008 we have been growing and refining our community culture and our technical tools to make genealogy collaboration fun and productive. We're proud that many genealogists now view WikiTree as the best place anywhere to collaborate.

If your DNA cousins collaborate with you on WikiTree the results can be powerful. The genealogical Holy Grail for many of us is to confirm our family tree with DNA. WikiTree facilitates this with status indicators to record and show when a connection has been confirmed with DNA, like this:

See DNA Confirmation when you're ready to start confirming connections.

This page was last modified 23:52, 14 February 2022. This page has been accessed 157,304 times.