Surname Search

(00:00):
Hi, this is Margaret from DataMiningDNA.com and this video is about a new feature from GEDmatch, which they rolled out at the end of January. Now this feature is part of the paid tier. You can pay 10 bucks for one month and for your 10 bucks you get all these tier one tools and write down at the bottom is the latest tool and it’s called Find surname matches from DNA matches. So it’s basically a surname search across your DNA matches who have uploaded GEDcom files to GEDmatch. Okay, so I’m just gonna click into this and one of the things that you may not notice immediately is that as a kinda almost a new departure for GEDmatch, a very welcome new departure, we have an instructions page. Just open that in a new tab, some good info here. And if you don’t skip the bottom part here, which is some scenarios that you might like to try out when using the tools.

(00:57):
So, in terms of picking the surnames, I’m going to go with the obvious, which is to use the surnames of four of my great grandparents on one particular side and then another four of the other. But one of the things that they suggest is find a census record for this ancestor and list the surnames on the page and on one or two pages on both sides, an interesting idea. So I’ll crack on with actually using the tool here. In terms of this search form, the only mandatory piece is to put in your kit number. So I’m gonna stick in the kit number of mine. The next part here, which is the max number of closest matches, which comes to consider default is 500 and the minimum total cent. Morgan got a companion article which I’ll link to in the description below on our blog. And I put some tips on what to do with these max matches and the minimum cm, et cetera.

(01:49):
The minimum number is surnames, project comp default is three. I’m gonna leave that at the default cause I’m gonna start with maybe four surnames. This one here is quite interesting. The search pedigree only to explain the implications of this, just touch on my search plan. My plan is to search at the level of my second great greats on my maternal side, my maternal grandfather’s grandparents. And I want to do a search with those four certains. So let me just enter those and then I’ll talk about the filter. Okay, so was gamble. If I click on search pedigree, the search tool will go and look at the GEDcoms and look for a combination of these four surnames, but only in the direct line of the jet coms, not the collateral lines. By the cholesterol lines, I mean the wider tree. So go back to your great great great grandparents, their siblings, their siblings and spouses and the descendants of the siblings and spouses.

(02:54):
Those are the co lines. I mentioned this because I intuitively thought what if I tick this on? It might make the search faster. I wasn’t sure how long the search is gonna take. It’s actually very fast anyway, but if you turn this on, the instructions tell you could make the search slower because it requires more processing power. As for this bit of using surname matching, double you look at the instruction page to explain what this means, just so I’m not telling. Yeah, it’s not mentioned. So have we gone that I’ve entered four surnames and just to be clear, I’ve left the minimum number of surnames, I’ve left it at the default of three, but I have specified for surnames. So let’s see what happens. Click submit and you can see processing here. And that was pretty quick. Now the maximum kits that checked for by DNA matches were the top 500 who have GEDcom, right?

(03:52):
So what I’m seeing at these top results here, this set of results are the J where all four surnames appear in the tree and there’s just two. Then we get to the combinations of permutations of three outta the four surnames I listed. And this is just your maths. Remember combinations of permutations from high school mats. Let’s say for this one it’s only found one, but for this combination it’s found three. So the next thing you might be wondering is what does this mean? Expected accidentally matches at zero two, a good thing that says zero because that’s not explained in the instructions. So top marks to GEDmatch for providing instructions page. But yeah, they don’t cover everything that you’re gonna see here. Just to illustrate the point here where I set the minimum number of surnames to three, I rather I kept it at the default and I’m getting these combinations three outta four, click the back button If I reduce this down to two, so now I’m gonna enter two and I’m gonna click submit.

(04:55):
Might take slightly longer, still very fast. And now we’ve still got the same list for four and it should be the same list as it is different permutations of three outta the four. But notice now I get, I’m now getting the permutations of two of the surnames outta the four. What I can do here is I can rule out some of these for investigations. So when I look at my pairings, I have a spouses I have and Cassidy McDermot, which means that in terms of focusing in on jacks to look at gamble, Fitzpatrick or reverse, no problem. That is pairing that I’m interested in with both of them in there. I’d zero in on this Fitzpatrick gamble, that spices in my tree. They’re not necessarily spices in this tree, this just means that they appear somewhere they could be in totally different areas of the tree in order to see how they appear. I need to take a look, but just in terms of doing an investigation, I’m gonna start at the top as these are the grandparents of my maternal grandfather. If all four appear in the tree, it’s possible that this is a second or third cousin of mine. The next thing to do is to investigate. Now what I found, and you’ll see in my article that the best use of the tool

(06:07):
Was using its integration with the one to one comparison tool, which is this feature, this CMP here, this link, it opens the one to one GEDcom comparison tool and it compares your own tree, your own associated with the DNA case that you specified with this that’s represented here. So that’s the column herem but you have to upload a GEDcom file.

(06:35):
And I would say that this tool makes it worth uploading these links here and this link here, these jump you into the actual tree itself. This particular DNA kit of mine has an associated GEDcom file. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t see this, but you would see this. So regardless if you haven’t uploaded GEDcom at all to GEDmatch, you will get this column which lets you jump into the particular tree of this individual. I found this not to be particularly useful and I’ll just show you why. I’ll take this top match here and I will, I open it in a new tab. I’m gonna jump into that tree. So this is a public tree, but I’m jumping in, I’m coming in at the home person and we’ve got this person’s children are living people therefore of course hidden. And I’ll click on the pedigree. So I’m opening up the pedigree chart and the what the instruction say to you.

(07:35):
There’s no search facility by the way. This search up here is a complete red herring. That search button is a search just opens up the tool that’s let to use search across GEDcoms. It doesn’t search in a particular, right? So it’s useless for particular exercise. What I want is the, I’m interested in now there’s no highlighting of this kind of red business in with this GEDcom display. The blue is a paternal side and the red is the maternal side of whoever, whoever you’re looking at in terms of their father and their mother. So nowhere on this page is going to highlight handily the surname that you’re searching for. So the way that GEDcom, sorry, way that GEDmatch say their instructions to look for the surnames is to use the browser search, which is a control F. So click control F on your keyboard and it pops up this little search box, but it doesn’t appear anywhere at this page nor do the other three surnames.

(08:41):
Okay, I tried this before, now that’s perfectly reasonable. And what the instructions are saying well is that they may not appear because they’re not on this page. Page defaults to show seven generations. So what you should do is increase that and I think GEDmatch instruction say to at least 12. I just 30, just take 30 and click submit. So this has widened. So now if I go looking for all, any or all of my four go, no, still not on the page we had Patrick, still not. There’s no fits. We had Cassidy, Nope, no Cassidy on this page. 

(09:30):
I put in there what’s going on here. But what’s going on here is a little bit of a disconnect between the default of what you search for and how GEDMatch display. This is a pedigree chart, right? It’s a direct line. I’m seeing the direct line, I’m not seeing any of the collateral entries which may or may not be in this, but in the search that I specified and what GEDmatch pretty much kinda steers you towards. And I wanted, I said don’t restrict to the pedigree only, I said give a search all the entire file for those surnames, but I’m not gonna see them no matter on the direct line cause they’re not part of this particular matches direct line. So they’re somewhere off on the collateral line. How do you get at that? Well, from here there I couldn’t find any handy way other than to look at the descendants of each of the highest generation, right? So suppose let’s say we’ll take this Thomas Bell and I just click into that entry here that opens up Thomas Bell and now I’m seeing Thomas Bell’s children. If I click the descendants chart, now I’m getting the descendants, all the descendants of Thomas Bell. So just to be clear,

(10:50):
This Thomas Bell has this particular individual, let me find a daughter at number two. Sabina Bell is a daughter of Thomas Bell, Sabina married Harry. And now what I have in as a collateral line in this particular tree are these Barretts where their daughters marry. I may see down a level their children with different surnames, right? And then we’re getting down to the hidden level as we go

(11:20):
Down Now I start having to look for gamble not there. Fitzpatrick Cassidy, nope. And McDermot. And now correct me in the comments if I’m wrong about this, but as far as I can tell, there’s no shortcut here. I have to go into each of these top ancestors and look at their descendants. Now that for any kind of tree that is, it’s highly tedious. Having said that, if I was really motivated I might do it. Then the other thing that GEDmatch says is that those four, all of those four names could be living people and therefore you’re not gonna see them. It says be aware. The true display may not show an individual with a surname. Usually that means the individual may be living are hidden. I’m assuming from that, and this, I may be wrong here and it’s not clear from the instructions, but my assumption is that if let’s say one of these hidden people, suppose that was gamble, I’m thinking that it’s still going to be a hit by the search tool be that as doesn’t me, this person was a close match, I’d be more inclined to look at the descendants of each of these ancestral lines to get to see the collateral and then do that control f search.

(12:45):
But, it’s really tedious. I think what’s going on here is that we’ve got a new tool, but it’s integrating with this really old display with has very limited search capabilities. I mean what I would like is that it would jump me to the individual, even if it jumped me to one of the four of those, it would help be helpful. What I will say is that this is a great incentive hopefully for GEDmatch to improve their tree display. So I wasn’t too wild about these links, I was far more appreciative of these links. And what this is gonna do is gonna compare your tree 

(13:27):
To this particular GEDcom. So if I click on the CMP Rebecca, I click and open it. Now this isn’t doing anything particularly new what it’s doing, it’s opening an existing tool, a tool that was already on and it’s actually, it’s part of the free tier, I believe the one to one GED comparison come down to these. So down here are your GEDcom comparison and search tools. And these are part of the free tier. And what it’s doing is it’s opening the two GEDcoms comparison. So if I just open it from here, from the homepage that opens that and you have to type in the GEDcom numbers yourself. What’s happening with using that CMP link is that it opens the existing tool and it

(14:12):
Prepopulates them and it’s just a little time saver, but anything that saves me time on GEDmatch is good with me. So I just click the compare and this is where you kinda start doing your evaluation. So this is running now, it’s running an algorithm, it’s not immediate. And what it’s doing now is it’s showing me what it thinks or matches. This particular tool has a very liberal comparison, pretty liberal, it’s matched Gaffney with ganley and those are not variants of the same name. I would prefer if they were a little bit more strict on that. And then we’ve got a match here, Anna and Hannah, that’s fine. Those are two variants. And here where we see where it’s kinda skewing is that we’ve got two different fathers and Edward and James and then we have Quinn. So I can rule that out just visually and say okay, that’s not a match.

(15:04):
And now I’m kind searching for these two variants dates or similar, but the bird places are different and so on and so forth. So what you can do is you can evaluate, and I’m looking at this, I’m gonna say, well this particular person’s tree is not, these people aren’t representative in my tree. So notice that it’s not showing me matching on the Fitzpatrick Cassidy and McDermot, I’m assuming cause the tree does have gamble in it. But the name and details are so different in terms of the spouse, parents, birth details, death details, probably the first name that this evaluation has said, okay, that that’s not a match. So straight away I can see that the four surnames that I put in to investigate, but they’re not coming up here and that therefore this DNA match the tree isn’t really gonna to be useful to me.

(15:56):
That is how I would continue to use this tool. I’ve work my way down, but I’d use the CMP to rule people out. And the final feature to look at is what happens when you have multiple rows in any of these lists and you have these little check boxes. Well that goes with this line here, which is a little vague. Click this button for additional display and processing options. What could those be for Wonders? Well I’ll take these two here and I’ll click submit . And what it’s doing, again, it’s jumping you into an existing paid tool, the multi kit analysis tool, and it’s those two DNA kits and your selected DNA kit and it’s getting you ready to run a multi kit analysis. So just to be clear on that, going back to the homepage down here to tier one, the, there’s Multiple kit analysis of the MKA tool.

(16:55):
So it’s the equivalent of launching this and having to put in the kits. So I’m not gonna go through this as it’s a little bit more complex and this videos getting kinda along. I really do think you get the best out this tool if you upload your family to GEDmatch. I’ve got an article which I’m linked to in the description below. It’s a step by step on how to add a family tree to GEDmatch in terms of uploading a family tree to any external site. Be sure that you’re familiar with the privacy policies, I’ve put some details on privatization, just be sure that you’re comfortable with how it goes about it. I’ll put all the links in the description below and that helps. And best of luck in your research.