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 :)

State of the year - 23andMe matches

So here it is, yet another calendar year ending. A great time for balancing!
Let's continue with our 23andMe matches series. Please, allow me to present the end of year numbers.

Let me also mention one great tip I got as a reaction to my blog(s).
Do not forget to explain / stress out how sharing with you can be beneficial to the other party! We are not a world of altruistic beings after all, but everyone has their own agenda and goals.

So where do we stand with our 23andMe matches?
One big change happened on my account since November. Now I have both of my parents as part of this same account. This definitely helps in many aspects of genetic genealogy. To remind you, I already had 3 of my grandparents on the account. One might think that the grandparents supersede parents, but the truth is simply the more the merrier - more matches, more IBS uncovered, ...
From now on, we will start including my parents numbers to the table.

Let me compare against the last blog series from November 18th:

	DNA matches	Anonymous	Accepted	% accepted
me (Kuba)	946 (+20)	239 (-20)	360 (+30)	38.05%
mother	845 (+1)*	271 (-16)*	286 (+38)*	33.85%
father	916 (+7)*	229 (-13)*	361 (+18)*	39.41%
m. grandma	1103 (+26)	302 (-21)	495 (+21)	44.88%
p. grandma	920 (+18)	275 (-11)	326 (+21)	35.44%
m. grandpa	943 (+32)	257 (-22)	334 (+38)	35.41%
wife	890 (+8)	274 (-21)	275 (+16)	30.90%

*mother and father differences are since Dec 10, few days after I merged them into a single account.

So what can we see here? Wow, what numbers! The effect of adding father and mother's kit and inviting (no letter apart from generic 23andMe message) everyone is much better than a hand prepared message! Such a positive end to 2016 here.

I newly included anonymous numbers, because many people were commenting on them based on the previous instalments of the series. You can clearly see, anonymous people are disappearing - either making themselves public or disappearing altogether after opting out on TNE ("the new experience" of 23andMe).
I will try to create a short article just covering the anonymous shares in a near future.

The disadvantage of the two additional accounts is more unaccepted outgoing invitations overall:

Will I be ever able to dwindle the number down significantly? Unlikely :( I am still clearly increasing my overall amount of matches, increasing my accepted shares and decreasing the amount of anonymous matches. So that's the most important thing.

Also there is a bug, disabling me from accepting the two pending invitations. Aaaargh. 23andMe know about it, though and are trying to fix it...

I want to create a single 2017 goals article, but let me state some bold goals relevant to 23andMe:

1. Transition to the TNE - this will increase number of matches, introduce open sharing, which should both significantly help with number of known triangulation groups...
2. Move over 40% of accepted shares on all accounts. Ideally breaking 50% on my kit.

Let me wrap it up here, wishing you all a great 2017.

23andMe matches update

  Thank you so much to all my cousins that accepted. It was not a total win, but I think combined with the blog, the campaign was a success. I am sure we will have more accepts in the coming days and weeks.

  So last week, we started at 2793 outstanding invitations, and we were able to bring it down to

2718. Not too bad. But I would prefer 1900 or 900 or 0 :D

Well, it is, what it is. We'll just have to live with this inconvenience of not tapping into the whole 23andMe DB.

So how did we fare on the individual accounts? Let's see.

DNA matches	Accepted	%
926 (+8)	330 (+22)	35.63714903
1077 (+1)	474 (+13)	44.01114206
902 (+4)	305 (+14)	33.81374723
914 (+3)	296 (+17)	32.38512035
886 (+4)	259 (+31)	29.23250564

We did not quite reach the goal of 20/20/20/20/40, but we did not land too far from it. Additional matches over the next week might close the gap for some of the kits.

Again, my kit here is the effect of double dipping - we invite some of these matches twice (my account as well as the grandparent's account) and it can help.

One interesting thing to note for people not aware of this - getting your matches to accept reveals you new matches that are not recent. In the last week, I got between 0 and 2 new recent matches per account, but most of the kits got a few more new matches in their list. Accepting is good for increasing the amount of visible cousins.

It's not only numbers, I got my closest cousin from paternal's grandfather side to accept. Likely a 3C1R of my father. She did not react to follow-up questions and internet searches/ancestry searches ran dry. But I have a nice 5 segment match I can utilize in the future. 

I still have a large backlog of messages to work through, and I am going for that after finishing this blog. That could yield more accepts as well as more identified common ancestors.

The final conclusion is, that even for a European ("Eastern" one at that), you are able to get close to 50% utilization of the 23andMe database, without Open Sharing taking in the account (none available on the old experience). With some basic work, you're able to get around one third of your cousinship to engage (this was only my second invite wave on my wife's account).

Can I get any more people on 23andMe to accept?

So in my first blog, I talked about the need to work on our family trees as the basis of successful genetic genealogy. And I have been doing just that. Working on the trees, studying the parish records and had some success, given the invested time.

For the purpose of this blog, I would like to return to my "home" DNA testing site - 23andMe.

Out there, I have almost 2800 unaccepted requests for DNA sharing. Yes, TWO THOUSAND, or rather close to three. This is frustrating. Very.

I want to do an invitation wave - send messages to my unaccepted matches, urging them share (hello, if you're actually reading the blog). And I want to measure the impact and share it with all of you.

So where do stand we with matches on 5 of my most interesting kits?

	DNA matches	Accepted	% accepted
me (Kuba)	918	308	33.55119826
m. grandma	1076	461	42.84386617
p. grandma	898	291	32.40534521
m. grandpa	911	279	30.62568606
wife	882	228	25.85034014

As you can see, I have worked most on my maternal grandmother. I have not particularly worked less on my wife, but I tested her year and something later then my grandparents (and I owe my numbers to the work on the grandparent matches).

What can we realistically expect? I would be happy if we get 20 matches per my grandparents (this could lead to more than 20 for my kit, if we're lucky) and perhaps 40 for my wife.

What will do? Write a common message to everyone.

Hello, 

my name is is Kuba Krchak and I am living in the Czech republic. I work as a computer scientist, with huge interest in genealogy, genetics, population genetics, next generation sequencing et.al. 

I maintain a blog bgengen.blogspot.com, where I just wrote about the struggle with matches on 23andMe. Please, check it out if you have a little bit of time. http://bgengen.blogspot.cz/2016/11/can-i-get-any-more-people-on-23andme-to.html

I am trying to work on the project of creating a recombination map for me and my family and eventually mapping the DNA to ancestors. 

You are one of my unshared matches and you accepting my sharing request would tremendously help me in my efforts.

I am eager to talk to you about your ancestry, but that is optional. Just accepting my sharing request is very valuable to me. 

Here is my basic public tree: www.wikitree.com/treewidget/Krchak-1/5 

My most up-to-date tree is http://krchak.myheritage.com

I also do have an ancestry tree: http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/82403601/family

My gedmatch ID is M240291. 

Best regards, 

Kuba 

kuba.krchak@gmail.com

We will slightly change it when writing to the match of a grandparent/wife, to include their information (tree, gedmatch, ..).

Let's do this and hope for the best. I will try to follow-up in a week with details how successful this campaign was. If you have any ideas, how to improve this approach, I am all ears.

MyHeritage DNA matching now works!

  Big news! MyHeritage DNA matching now works. They consider themselves out of beta, but that may be a little premature. Why?

  Well they went from loose to pretty conservative. Now, you can be fairly confident with all of your matches, but do not expect a lot of them.


Let me show you how many matches (that I have not uploaded myself) me and family have:
Myself:  1 single match (with no associated tree)
My parents: 5, 1 
My 3 tested grandparents: 3, 0, 3
My wife: 5

The good news is I know some of these matches from 23andMe, gedmatch or Ancestry. So they all seem to be the real deal.
Another positive thing is the highest % of trees among my matches from any service I have used so far! If only there were more matches.

  So why is there just a handful of matches? Imputation is a method where based on a handful of letters (SNPs) in your genotyped result, much larger portion of your genome is statistically reconstructed - using database of full sequenced genomes (like the 1000 Genome Project). The nature of imputation calls for conservative approach, else you will confirm people based on identical imputed sequences, without any ground in actual genotyped data.
  DNA.land uses the same approach and I also have but a single match there, and my grandmother with 3 on MyHeritage has 2.

  The verdict? This is much better, but useful only a little bit. We need more matches! Still I encourage anyone serious in genealogy and genetic genealogy to upload, there is no thing like fishing in too many ponds. And the amount of matches with trees is unprecedented for me.