Adding Your Ancestry Thulines™

In order to generate DNA charts, you will need to add your DNA matches and their ancestors up to your shared Most Recent Common Ancestor (#MRCA) into your genealogy database using your favorite genealogy editing application. #Gigatrees, somewhat obviously, needs to have both ancestral lines included in your #GEDCOM file for it to be able to determine the MCRA. When entering these collateral relatives into your database, you will have the opportunity (See below) to "skip" these persons, so that they are omitted from all other Gigatrees pages, except the DNA charts and tables, and no profile pages will be created for them. In the example that follows, I used Family Historian as the add my DNA matches.

To begin this example, I opened Ancestry.com and looked for a new DNA match.

I chose the first entry and clicked it on their link to open the DNA match page.

I opened the ancestor DNA chart for the 2nd great-grandmother shown to verify that this person had not already beed added to my <DNA> settings.

I then clicked on the 2nd great-grandmother to open the common ancestor page.

I then open my editor and located the MRCA.

Since the first generation descendant was not already in my database, I added them.

After entering the subsequent generations, I sorted the index by date updated, placing the new entries at the top of the page so that I could record their record id numbers for skipping later.

Next I added the DNA match to my <DNA> setting. I set the living flag because in most cases, this will be true. Doing so automatically adds them to the <ForceLivingIds> list. If you will be publishing your site online, you will need to set the hide living security flag as well so that their names will be obfuscated when being displayed.

  <Gigatrees>
    <DNA>
      <Relative>
        <Tester>           Tim Forsythe </Tester>
        <Match>            Michael Dahm </Match>
        <SharedDna>        41           </SharedDna>
        <NumberOfSegments> 3            </NumberOfSegments>
        <TestingCompany>   Ancestry     </TestingCompany>
        <Living>           true         </Living>
      </Relative>
    </DNA>
	
    <Security>
      <HideLiving> true </HideLiving>
    </Security>	
  </Gigatrees>

You could stop here, but if you will be including these charts into a larger family tree, you may not want to process these individuals. Not only will these new additions add additional processing time, but they will result in new profile pages and will be added to the name indexes. There are two options for skipping these individuals.

Skipping individuals (option 1)

The generic method for skipping an individual is to add them to the skips ids list by id or name. If adding by name, the name must be unique. If you are using a service like Ancestry.com as your editor, and you do not know these individuals record ids, using their name may be your only option.

  <Security>
    <SkipIds> John J. Dahm; I25906; I25907; I25908 </SkipIds>
  </Security>

Skipping individuals (option 2)

The other option you have for skipping all these individuals is to add the non-standard GEDCOM skip tag ( _SKIP ) directly to the individual's GEDCOM record. This is what I do. Family Historian makes this easy by allowing its users to copy and paste GEDCOM tags into records.

From here I followed the step-by-step guide for Configuring Ancestor DNA Charts, and the rebuilt my ancestor DNA charts. When the build was complete, I copied the generated database to my hosting service, and then reloaded the page to verify that they had been added.

I then opened the DNA relatives table to check that they were included there as well.

In summary, Gigatrees provides a fairly straight forward method for adding your Ancestry Thrulines™ to Gigatrees for inclusion in your ancestor DNA tables and charts. You can do the same for MyHeritage's Theory of Family Relativity™ matches, as well as matches found at #GEDMatch and #FTDNA and any other service that provides DNA match data. Because some of these services base their MCRA determination on user provided data, it is not uncommon to find valid DNA matches with invalid common lines of descent, requiring a bit of research to correct the lines before entering them in your database. Unlike Ancestry and MyHeritage, where you cannot correct those errors, Gigatrees provides a method for combining DNA match data from all your relavant sources, precorrected by you the consumer. You also can decide which lines to add and which to not. Since most of us have gazillions of lines to consider, I personally only add matches who share segments totaling 20cM or more, unless my number of DNA relatives for a particular MRCA is less than 6 or has fewer than three independent lines of descent, that is first generation children, but will be quick to remove them from my database when better matches are found. This has a dual benefit. First it keeps the number of new lines in my database small, and since I enable the <ForceProvenReliability> option, I minimize the inadvertent raising of reliability assessments beyond their intented reliability.