Last Year's Christmas Present to Myself - DNA Painter!

Last Christmas, I treated myself to a subscription of DNAPainter.  Before I subscribed, I registered for free. This allowed me to make one map using their Chromosome mapping tool. (Subscribers are allowed to make up to 50 maps.) About thirty minutes into the task, I decided one map would just not do, and paid for a yearly subscription (currently $55.00).

If you would like to see the difference between being a free registered user as opposed to a paid subscriber you can find that information HERE.

Below is my DNA map for my four grandparents. 

As you can see, it is still a work in progress. Each of us, of course, gets 50 % of our DNA from our father and 50% from our mother.  Theoretically that would give you 25% from each of your grandparents. However, in reality, you might get anywhere from 18 to 33% from a particular grandparent.

Doing a Chromosome map of my inherited DNA from my grandparents, the mapping tool keeps track of the percentages.

My grandfathers seem to have donated more of my DNA than my grandmothers.  Of course, it could change a little when (read if) I figure out how to allocate the remaining segments. 

My second favorite tool that you can access for free is the Ancestral Tree.  With your free registered account, you are allowed to import one tree up to 4^th great grandparent level.  As a paid subscriber you can import up to 50 trees and importing ability extends to your entire tree.

You can view your ancestral tree in tree format, fan format or text format.  It also prints you a pedigree collapse report that gives you the number of times an ancestor appears in your ancestral tree.  I have 3 ancestors that appear 3 times in my chart and 30 that appear twice, all are on my paternal line.

Below is the view of the fan format.  On the right-hand side is your maternal line and on the left-hand side is your paternal side. While you can set the tree format anywhere from four generations to “all available” the fan format goes back 9 generations to your 7X great grandparents. 

 You can easily see where the holes are in my genealogy. On my father’s side I have a “mystery” 3X grandfather, who deserves his own blog post. On my mother’s side you can see the pink area is the most represented.  That happens to be my great grandfather Samuel Henry Hoy’s ancestral line.  Sam’s family in the main were German, and Germans were very faithful in documenting births, deaths, baptisms, and marriages.  It is no coincidence that the best represented on my paternal side comes from my German Great Grandfather, Leo. Again, faithful documentation saves the day.

When you hover over an entry, the information you have included appears within the white half circle. 

You can see the information that my gedcom imputed for Frances.  Frances happens to be one of my ancestors that pops up a total of three times.  It is a little difficult to see, but it shows you the three different routes that connect her DNA to me.  Though the fan format only goes back to my 7^th great grandparents Frances appears on my family tree in two different generations, two of those being an 8^th generation place, and that information is also noted. 

Recently, I found additional ancestor information that I did not have when I initially made my tree.  In the tree format, it is very easy to update manually.  What happens if you find an error in your tree?  Again, you can fix it manually, or if the mistake impacts a large portion of the tree, you could delete your first tree and add the corrected gedcom, instead.

There are filters and something called dimensions that can be used to help visualize different aspects of your tree. 

Interested in finding out which of your ancestors might have contributed to your XDNA?  There is a filter for that. It works on both the tree and fan formats.  Below is what the filter looks like on my fan format.

Want to know how long your ancestors lived?  There is a dimension for that.  Of course, this only works for the ancestors that have both a birth and death year.  

The Ancestral Tree tool also gives you a Tree Completeness Report.  The report goes back to your 10^th Great Grandparents (that’s a whopping 12 generations back from you!)

As you can see, I have 0 of a potential 4096 10^th Great Grandparents.  And that mysterious 3X great grandfather stands out like a sore thumb (at least to me) where I have 31 out of 32 3^rd Great Grandparents, giving me a 97% completeness at that level. It doesn’t bother me, though. Okay, maybe it bothers me a little.  

I don’t think that everyone who gets a DNA test needs DNA Painter tools, but if you are like me – curious, committed to understanding your ancestral inheritance, and need visual cues to aid your understanding, DNA Painter is fantastic. (And I’ve only scratched the surface!) Besides, the colorful maps and charts are eye poppingly gorgeous.

Until Next Time

© 3 December 2023, Teresa L. Snyder, Desktop Genealogist Unplugged