23andMe move to the New Experience coming!

So 23andMe has finally gotten to transitioning foreign accounts WITHOUT health information - sorry UK, Canada or Denmark.

What will it bring? Worse ability to work with DNA relatives :( That's the biggest bummer, the new interface is more newbie oriented and does not offer as quick and outcome oriented  capabilities as the old one. Also, the 529andYou chrome plugin does not work perfectly (at least yet), that is going to be a big downside. I only like 23andMe most to work with, because of the powerful plugin 529andYou made work with triangulations so effortless.

On the other hand, we have a lot to look for.

1. Accepting invitations, yay! Yes I had my account bugged for maybe 4 months now, unable to accept any invitations from others.
2. Reading and writing messages! Yipeee!! Again, my account, due to it's size, probably, was no longer able to read new messages from people. Sorry everyone! 
3. Contacting Anonymous matches! Finally, we will be able to contact anonymous people again. They often do not know they are anonymous and are perfectly fine with sharing.
4. New In-Common-With functionality. Huge! I am so looking forward to learning where do my anonymous matches fit. And others as well.
5. All other little nice things like updated male haplogroups.

I want to take this opportunity to run one last invitation wave on the old site. Who knows how things will be, and one thing is clear. Any matches you have persist through the transition.
So clearly matches = good :)

If you are my match checking up here, I would love to help you understand genetic genealogy or be able to understand your Central European, or even Czech ancestry better.
Still, if you are not interested in any of that, and can just approve my sharing request, that will help me a bunch in my family research. It will enable me to better define triangulations, portions of my and my matches' DNA coming from a specific ancestor. This will only show me a very small portion of the DNA we share and poses no security risk.

I would also like to do an update to my matches series. Where did we get since January first?

Let me compare against the last blog series from December 28th:

	DNA matches	Anonymous	Accepted	% accepted
me (Kuba)	952 (+6)	214 (-25)	381 (+21)	40.02%
mother	854 (+9)	239 (-32)	311 (+25)	36.42%
father	918 (+2)	196 (-33)	391 (+30)	42.59%
m. grandma	1122 (+19)	293 (-9)	516 (+21)	45.99%
p. grandma	925 (+5)	241 (-34)	337 (+11)	36.43%
m. grandpa	957 (+14)	229 (-28)	357 (+23)	37.30%
wife	898 (+8)	224 (-50)	304 (+29)	33.85%

What is important to say, is that this was without any invitation messages being written. Nada.

And we're still breaking the magical 40% accepted on some kits already! Sweet.
Despite the negative sentiment everywhere (facebook, forums), I can still report number of matches growing on ALL of my kits.
WHILE, number of anonymous matches dropping, sometimes at a speed of light - 50 anonymous matches disappearing from my wife's list. WOW.

Simple observation. As long as you keep inviting your relatives to share, you should be good. See more and more cousins to research.

So where are we with unaccepted matches? Let's see:

Hm, 6 bugged invitations. Hope they stay for the TNE.

And over three and half thousands of unaccepted invitations. Including some of the closest ones. I sure hope this invitation round will reach to some of these cousins. Getting down to 3000 would be awesome ;)

So let's look forward to the New Experience with positive attitude. There are some great new features in there. As well as a renewed possibility to connect with anonymous matches.

And last but not least, I am working on my tree hard (as time permits) so I can find a connection for all of these new matches :)

We begin!

  I always thought about maintaining a genealogy or genetic genealogy blog, aimed especially to educate the Czech and Central European genealogist. But also helping everyone fighting with this difficult topic. Additionally, I often find myself wanting to add something to the discussions and idea going around the internet, without a proper channel.

  Today, I want to start with something, every genetic genealogist should put at the front of his efforts. And that is his family tree.

  What we often hear from the testing companies, is 3rd cousin this, 4th cousin that, but the reality of our matches is different. We can visit http://isogg.org/wiki/Cousin_statistics to see, that even with conservative cousin count estimate, we are likely to have more 8th genetic cousins than 7th genetic cousins that 6th genetic cousins and so forth.

What this means for us, genetic genealogists? If we want to find common ancestors with our matches, we need to actually work on our trees! And firmly deep at that. 8th cousins are at the 7 great grandparents level, meaning we have 512 of these ancestors, which amounts to 1022 ancestors including all previous generations from parents up.

For two genetic genealogist, to be able to compare their most likely type of cousin, 8th cousin - they would both need to have 1022 correct ancestors in their trees and compare them.

This goal is probably not feasible in the Czech republic, due to typical time where records fail to be available (end of 17th century). Still I want to be able to track my progress of this goal, and blog seems like a perfect medium.

Let's do this from the perspective of my grandparents first, and then one for me. I wrote a script that pulls this analysis out of GEDCOM, it is not perfect, but being a single ancestor off here and there won't make or break this statistics.

Maternal Grandmother Anežka Kočíbová, 1935, gedmatch ID# M789839

gen#	rel	~DoB	match	#anc/gen	#idd/gen	%idd/gen	#anc	#idd	%idd
1	p	1907		2	2	100.00%	2	2	100.00%
2	gp	1873	1C	4	4	100.00%	6	6	100.00%
3	Ggp	1838	2C	8	8	100.00%	14	14	100.00%
4	GGgp	1806	3C	16	15	93.75%	30	29	96.67%
5	3Ggp	1778	4C	32	30	93.75%	62	59	95.16%
6	4Ggp	0	5C	64	48	75.00%	126	107	84.92%
7	5Ggp		6C	128	16	12.50%	254	123	48.43%
8	6Ggp		7C	256	4	1.56%	510	127	24.90%
9	7Ggp		8C	512	1	0.20%	1022	128	12.52%

Maternal Grandfather Jan Musil, 1927, gedmatch ID# M396921

gen#	rel	~DoB	match	#anc/gen	#idd/gen	%idd/gen	#anc	#idd	%idd
1	p	1899		2	2	100.00%	2	2	100.00%
2	gp	1860	1C	4	4	100.00%	6	6	100.00%
3	Ggp	1829	2C	8	8	100.00%	14	14	100.00%
4	GGgp	1799	3C	16	16	100.00%	30	30	100.00%
5	3Ggp	1767	4C	32	32	100.00%	62	62	100.00%
6	4Ggp		5C	64	34	53.13%	126	96	76.19%
7	5Ggp		6C	128	35	27.34%	254	131	51.57%
8	6Ggp		7C	256	23	8.98%	510	154	30.20%
9	7Ggp		8C	512	25	4.88%	1022	179	17.51%

Paternal Grandmother Irena Moravcová, 1932, gedmatch ID# M425590

gen#	rel	~DoB	match	#anc/gen	#idd/gen	%idd/gen	#anc	#idd	%idd
1	p			2	2	100.00%	2	2	100.00%
2	gp		1C	4	4	100.00%	6	6	100.00%
3	Ggp		2C	8	8	100.00%	14	14	100.00%
4	GGgp		3C	16	11	68.75%	30	25	83.33%
5	3Ggp		4C	32	18	56.25%	62	43	69.35%
6	4Ggp		5C	64	27	42.19%	126	70	55.56%
7	5Ggp		6C	128	15	11.72%	254	85	33.46%
8	6Ggp		7C	256	7	2.73%	510	92	18.04%
9	7Ggp		8C	512	6	1.17%	1022	98	9.59%

Paternal Grandfather Emil Krchák, 1930, no autosomal data

gen#	rel	~DoB	match	#anc/gen	#idd/gen	%idd/gen	#anc	#idd	%idd
1	p			2	2	100.00%	2	2	100.00%
2	gp		1C	4	4	100.00%	6	6	100.00%
3	Ggp		2C	8	8	100.00%	14	14	100.00%
4	GGgp		3C	16	14	87.50%	30	28	93.33%
5	3Ggp		4C	32	25	78.13%	62	53	85.48%
6	4Ggp		5C	64	25	39.06%	126	78	61.90%
7	5Ggp		6C	128	3	2.34%	254	81	31.89%
8	6Ggp		7C	256	0	0.00%	510	81	15.88%
9	7Ggp		8C	512	0	0.00%	1022	81	7.93%

Now it is clear, there is a lot of work to be done, and it is even very visible, where I should start (my paternal grandfather).


Overall, myself, gedmatch ID# M240291 (PM240291M1, PM240291P1)

gen#	rel	~DoB	match	#anc/gen	#idd/gen	%idd/gen	#anc	#idd	%idd
1	p	1960		2	2	100.00%	2	2	100.00%
2	gp	1931	1C	4	4	100.00%	6	6	100.00%
3	Ggp		2C	8	8	100.00%	14	14	100.00%
4	GGgp		3C	16	16	100.00%	30	30	100.00%
5	3Ggp		4C	32	32	100.00%	62	62	100.00%
6	4Ggp		5C	64	56	87.50%	126	118	93.65%
7	5Ggp		6C	128	104	81.25%	254	222	87.40%
8	6Ggp		7C	256	135	52.73%	510	357	70.00%
9	7Ggp		8C	512	59	11.52%	1022	416	40.70%

Now having over 50% of 6xgreat grandparents is not terrible, but I am positive much more coverage is achievable.

I will try to publish the progress as it makes sense (few times a year) and we'll see how some improvements of my tree help with the genetic genealogy research :)

Thanks for reading!

Kuba

P.S. This effort, GEDCOM script and this blog were originally inspired by 2015 blog wave on this topic, including http://thegeneticgenealogist.com/2015/08/11/how-much-of-your-family-tree-do-you-know-and-why-does-that-matter.